Despite challenges, national and regional series are bullish on the future of midget racing.

Midget racing's appeal is undeniable. Drivers and fans alike just love the speed, the slides, the wheel-to-wheel battles up and down the field. 

"They do a fantastic job racing, especially for as small and as fast as the cars are," said Quinn McCabe. "They're just fun to watch." 

McCabe is the president of the Badger Midget Auto Racing Association (BMARA). The Sun Prairie, Wisconsin-based sanction has been around in one form or another since the mid-1930s. That kind of history gives McCabe perspective when he said, "Midget racing is probably the best racing to watch anywhere in the world."

That sentiment was echoed by Tyler Bachman of Xtreme Outlaw Midgets, which is under the umbrella of the Xtreme Outlaw Series that's headquartered in Concord, North Carolina. 

"Midget racing is the best, action-packed racing ever," he said. "I mean, you're looking at three-wide, you're looking at slide jobs, and just great racing. It's the best form of motorsports competition we have."

Certainly, midget racing faces challenges, rising costs chief among them. Yet these two men, and others we spoke to for this story, are bullish on the future of midgets, and not just because of the adrenaline shot they provide. Pick a metric—car counts, schedules, new series—and most of them are trending in the right direction. 

Kind of Astounding

Case in point: The Chili Bowl Midget Nationals, which has drawn midget racers from around the world to the indoor race event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for nearly 40 years. 

"Like all racing, it's had its ups and downs," admitted Bryan Hulbert, "but this year we had well over 360 cars in the building. We had more trailers, and I feel like we had more people in the pits than we've had almost ever." He said he saw more sponsors—"new names within the sport"—and more teams emerging. "We had teams that doubled in size this year. Some teams went from three cars to six, and we had one team that went from four cars to eight. It's really kind of astounding to see the teams grow that fast." 

There are cars built specifically for the Chili Bowl, "but just about everybody brings their outdoor car to run indoors now," Hulbert said. The Chili Bowl rulebook no longer allows what he called "thin frame" cars, "because they've gained so much speed, even on that small of a track." (The Chili Bowl runs on a quarter-mile clay oval.)

"The actual rules fit on one piece of paper," Hulbert noted. "For the most part, as long as it looks like a midget, sounds like a midget, and runs like a midget, you can run it." 
That doesn't mean the rules are lax. Cody Cordell, the Chili Bowl's new technical director, is "putting a better focus on the rules in place," Hulbert said. "We want it to be a fair event. We want people to enjoy themselves and not feel like they're rolling in with a completely unfair advantage." Tire doping and traction control were recent problem areas, and they were addressed in what Hulbert called a "very transparent and very open" way. "If we found anything, it was reported on. If I'm not giving specifics, then I'm opening the door for people to continue doing the same blatantly dumb stuff."

Midgets have experienced a boom within the last decade, reported Kirk Spridgeon of USAC in Speedway, Indiana. "Not that many years ago, we were piecing together a schedule that couldn't even reach 20 races, and that was with us being forced to promote races ourselves," he said. "We had very low car counts at a few events, and our number of full-time competitors was down to just a few.

"Currently, it's much more popular and we've seen that in the competitor following, along with interest from promoters for booking races, as well as fan and viewership numbers," he continued. "It is still fickle, as midgets always have been, but we've found a good balance on our schedule after hitting a high in number of races in 2021–2022. Between us and the WRG-owned Xtreme Outlaw Midgets series, midget teams are able to run a lot of races with two premier organizations. I think both of our series actually had to back down the number of events just a bit, because teams were running so many races. We both know where we can take them and be successful, both in terms of track size and location, and how important it is to have a cooperative schedule without conflicts."

Spridgeon clarified that USAC and Xtreme are nearly identical in their midget series' rules, and a car that is legal in one is legal in the other without any changes.

Co-Sanctioning Partners

The Xtreme Outlaw Midgets series is "going to some different race tracks" for the 28-race 2025 season, Bachman said. "We are co-sanctioning with the RMMRA [Rocky Mountain Midget Racing Association] in the Colorado area. The Midget Roundup has always been a big race for them, and now that we've partnered with them, we hope to make that a cornerstone event in the future."

Xtreme Outlaw Midgets is also racing at... 

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Photo courtesy of Team Green Productions and POWRi