PHOENIX — Another long season has come to the checkered flag. It’s time to put away the helmet and gloves and enjoy some rest and recovery time.
It’s also a chance to look forward to more racing in 2023 and reflect on the accomplishments and lessons learned this past season.
It was an incredible racing season. Through the highs and lows, I accomplished my primary goal. That is continue my development as a race car driver through the most interesting path possible — the Byrd Racing path. Being a part of this old-school revival of driver development is a dream come true, a dream I didn’t even know I had until I started this racing journey a little over four years ago.
An Indy 500 run could realistically be just around the corner.
That would have been mind-boggling when I was 18 years old and had just started in go-karts. This is an opportunity to look back at this past year to recap and highlight my favorite moments from my craziest and most interesting season of racing yet.
Thanks to my dad, who meticulously kept track of my statistics, I competed in 108 races in 17 different types of race cars. I raced 17 different road courses and 15 different oval tracks, 11 on pavement and four on dirt. That’s a combination of racing diversity and frequency that has never been achieved, especially in this age of specialization.
I had 29 wins in 108 races, 51 podiums, 64 top-five finishes and 82 top-10 efforts.
Overall, I think the season results were very strong and what we were aiming for in terms of realistic goals for wins, podiums, top fives and top 10s. I’m happy with these results.
As I was going back through all my driver diary entries this year, I realized that my favorite moments were the ones where I showed my highest level of competitiveness, as well as when I developed the most as a race car driver. A lot of those were the weekends when I was driving formula cars. In many instances they were memorable to me because I was either performing well against strong drivers or very strong cars.
Often, I was able to win.
My F1000 weekends at Circuit of The Americas, Barber Motorsports Park and Indianapolis, I was beating cars that were faster than me or outdriving very stout competition. This, while substantially improving and breaking track records.
Those weekends stand out because they helped prove to me and to everyone else around me that I am the real deal.
Winning races in F1000, F2000 and Atlantic helped solidify that I was truly becoming a strong racing driver — a point I had not reached at that stage of my career.
Later in the season, when my short-track racing really started to pick up, I began to have the same sorts of competitive performances against pro level, veteran drivers that proved to me even more deeply that my competitiveness as a racer goes beyond what I would consider semi-pro road course racing.
My performances at Gateway in the Silver Crown car, where I ran third and finished fifth and at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, where I ran third in the midget and probably would have finished second both stand out. They were performances that revealed to me and the teams that I was working with that I had what it takes to beat the very best in the business.
There were a lot of other weekends on both road courses and short tracks where I had very strong driving performances. Those stood out because of how memorable and meaningful they were to me in terms of signifying my continuing development as a race car driver.
Nearly every single weekend was a pleasure and wonderful opportunity to learn and become the racer I know that I can be.
Ultimately, being able to do what I do is an absolute blessing and privilege that I thank God for every single day. My plan and hope for the future is to continue to take full advantage of every opportunity that comes my way both on and off the race track.
I also wanted to personally thank each one of you SPEED SPORT readers who are following along with my journey with Byrd Racing. It means the world to me and I hope you continue to enjoy it.
I also wanted to thank every single person who works tirelessly day in and day out to make what I do possible. You can’t do what I do without the support and hard work of many different racing teams who put their blood, sweat and tears into their work so that we can do what we all love to do, go auto racing.