Winning the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl and grasping the Golden Driller is always a joyous moment. For many teams it is the reward for months of painstaking labor constructing and preparing a unique car tailored to the event.
For the driver there is the deep satisfaction that comes with topping more than 350 of your peers.
All of that said, moments after the checkered flag waved on the 37th edition of this classic midget race the scene that unfolded trackside was akin to an emotional tsunami. There was good reason for this.
In the middle of the mayhem was Kevin Swindell. Not only did he win this race four times as a driver, he did it in consecutive years. That’s unprecedented.
Then, that part of his life came to an end way too soon. It would be so easy to be bitter, and in quiet moments he can be excused for harboring those feelings.
Yet, Swindell and his wife, Jordan, persevered, and now here he was. He had done what was necessary to reach the summit. There is nothing glamorous about spending hours in the shop.
Swindell’s hired gun, Logan Seavey, also knew what it takes to surmount a daunting challenge. Heart surgery isn’t something the average teenager must endure. Seavey did. Then, he got right back in the game and won midget championships and big races.
Despite this, he remained underrated. Seavey was a NASCAR development driver and he knows firsthand the bitter lesson most will swallow at some point in their life.
The stark reality is that sometimes life really isn’t fair. On this night, however, all was right with the world. What had transpired in the past only provided a context to understand the unbridled joy of the victors.
Perhaps overlooked in the hoopla that followed Seavey’s triumph was the contribution of one of Kevin Swindell’s partners. Massachusetts-based car owner Tim Bertrand and Bertrand Motorsports have enjoyed great success in midget racing. There’s just one catch. The primary focus of this team has been pavement racing. True enough, Bertrand had dipped his toe into the Chili Bowl before, but this time he took on a bit more than had been customary.
Bertrand is a busy man. By the time he headed to Tulsa he was concluding an eight-year run as the president of the Northeastern Midget Ass’n, a proud club that is set for its 70th year of operation this season. He is also the president of Project 44, a company with a software platform that provides tracking for the supply chain. It is a service that major companies use to track ocean containers, trucks or rail cars.