His years of experience making sprint cars go fast don’t apply.
“You know, we use set up blocks and put them under the axle and have torsion stops,” Schatz said. “In their world, they have a spring smasher and it sets the load to that corner. They know what the load needs to be. Fifteen pounds could be the difference between a good car and a bad car. There’s not a lot of error there. In the sprint car world, we can wind multiple turns of weight in one corner and not feel a big difference.
“It just tells you the correlation between a torsion bar and a spring, how much difference there is in the way they work. A spring has memory. A torsion bar doesn’t really have anything. It’s old school technology. I wouldn’t even call it technology. It’s just something that’s stuck around in our sport and nobody has really changed. It would be fun one day to make them similar but today it’s just not happening.”
Even the way the late model drives compared to the sprint car forces Schatz to change his entire mentality on how to run the car.
“The late models rotate with the left rear in the corner and right front has to be buried (into the track),” he said. “They turn on the gas, but they don’t really turn when you’re off the gas pedal. There’re so many different scenarios. The way the car carries the air over it is just as important as the sprint car. But the sprint car pulls it a different way and does it completely different. You have to keep a completely open mindset and a whole different scenario about it.”
While the late model races are a time for Schatz to shed the stress of running for a championship, that doesn’t negate his competitive nature.
He wouldn’t consider himself a relaxed racer. Especially when competing against the likes of Sheppard, 2004 World of Outlaws Late Model champion Scott Bloomquist and last year’s Rookie of the Year Ricky Weiss.
“Anytime you put the helmet on at the racetrack you’re not going to settle for anything less than checkers,” Schatz said. “It is relaxing in some scenes. In others, you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall a little bit because you want to do better than you really do. It’s a tough battle with those guys. They stay on top of it. They eat, sleep and drink it. And if you don’t do that every day it’s hard to stay competitive.”
Schatz has mentioned before that at some point in his career he might consider transitioning from racing a sprint car full-time to a late model. He hasn’t sold himself on that idea yet. But isn’t completely dismissing it either.
“At the end of the day, I love what I do with the Sprint Cars,” he said. “I don’t know if I would ever walk away from it to do one or the other. It would be cool. In a perfect world, a guy could run both Series. But that would be pretty farfetched to be able to do and be competitive. Once you get to racing for championships that gets to be your focus and what you want to do. Maybe I’ll never be that competitive in the Late Model world, but you never know. Maybe years down the road that’ll change.”
For now, he’s going to enjoy a rare opportunity to run with the Outlaws in his home state this weekend before returning to his sprint car next week.