Mechanical, incidental woes won’t slow experienced Illinois racer in fight for wins
CONCORD, NC (Aug. 22, 2024) – In a sea of teenage and 20-something phenoms of the national Midget ranks, Zach Daum remains the lone veteran presence on the roster of the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota.
Armed with years of experience behind the wheel of several open-wheel rides, the 32-year-old from Pocahontas, IL, has learned a lot from racing alongside the heroes of the non-winged world. Clauson, Darland, Hines, East, Kuhn – Daum could go on all day listing the names he learned invaluable techniques from, and still applies to his game today.
He’s fielded cars with his own support for most of his Midget career before becoming a hired gun in the 2020s, winning the inaugural Xtreme Midget championship in 2022 with Bundy Built Motorsports and later making the move to his current home at Trifecta Motorsports in June 2023.
Team co-owners Steve Carbone and Staton Flurry are in their seventh year of partnership and second full season chasing a national Midget series championship. The two have fielded Midgets at the Chili Bowl Nationals every year since 2018, and since linking with Daum last summer, they’ve been pleased with Daum’s veteran skills and the care he takes with the cars.
To Daum, it’s an essential attribute for modern Midget racers.
“I kinda pride myself on not tearing up a lot of stuff,” Daum said. “Carbone yells at me all the time because I never go through a front bumper or right-side nerf bar or anything like that. You can race without making contact.
“I know that when you’re racing, you’re gonna make contact with people. But these aren’t bumper cars. We don’t need to be hitting people.”
Racing hard, yet clean, has afforded Daum several opportunities over his career, most recently the opportunity to drive the Trifecta team and be part of the successful stretch they experienced in the 2023 season. In the last two thirds of the schedule, the pairing came nearly all the way back from over 200 points down in the Xtreme Outlaw Series championship standings, won five races and clinched the inaugural Xtreme Outlaw-POWRi Challenge miniseries championship.
Daum’s no-quit attitude and on-track intensity is why Carbone keeps him in the seat, even in the roughest of times.
“We’re extremely serious about what we’re doing, and Zach is a perfect example,” Carbone said. “You will see him have some flare-ups on the racetrack, especially with his famous one-finger salute, and that is his passion coming out. If you’ve met him or talked to him, he’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. If you jeopardize his racecraft or put a sour note on Midget racers, he just flips a switch.
“It’s a guy you’ll never meet anywhere else.”
While the Oklahoma-based team was looking forward to replicating the numbers they produced in 2023, the 2024 season has fallen short of their championship expectations. They began the year strong with back-to-back podiums in Du Quoin, however, mechanical issues and on-track incidents hindered their progress through the first half of the season, leaving them 500 points behind the championship points leader in fifth place.
“Highs and lows, I guess; it hasn’t been as good of a year as it was last year,” Daum said. “Last year, we won a couple USAC races and five Xtreme races. This year, we’ve won one Xtreme race, so obviously not been as good of a year. But you’ll have those years – the peaks and valleys of racing. You ride the wave as long as you can when they’re going up and you try to find the next one when you’re down to get back up.”
Despite the struggles, the team had a career-best trip out to North Carolina’s Millbridge Speedway in May, where they ran runner-up to Karter Sarff in the first race of the two-day event before scoring their lone Feature win of the season in the finale Wednesday night. All of this, only one year after Daum finished 15th on the opening night before taking a hard crash in a Last Chance event the next night.
“There was a few races on my schedule that I was like, ‘OK, we can win here, we can win here, we’re good at these places,’” Daum said. “We were all dreading going to Millbridge, and that’s the only highlight of our year so far.
“That was our worst racetrack last year and it’s our best racetrack this year. It’s funny how things like that work.”
While they work to get back to Victory Lane again before the end of the season, each of the five remaining races on the 2024 Xtreme Outlaw Series schedule are in Daum’s home state of Illinois, including one of his home tracks – Highland Speedway.
“It’d be cool to at least win one or a couple of them,” Daum said. “We’re finally getting back to being better. I’ve complained about the racecar every night we’ve raced and not being comfortable and not being the same as what we were last year. I feel like we’re finally getting back to feeling pretty good again.”
Daum and Trifecta Motorsports get back into action with the Xtreme Outlaw Series at Southern Illinois Raceway on Friday, Sept. 13. Advance sale tickets are available now.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS RACEWAY TICKETS
If you can’t be there to watch in person, stream every lap live on DIRTVision.