CONCORD, N.C. — Cannon McIntosh’s run to the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota championship was one defined by reunion, maturity and redemption.
After a bitter defeat in the final races of 2023, he returned home empty-handed, unsure of his plans for a return to the national Midget circuit in 2024. But after some off-season discussion, the 21-year-old from Bixby, Okla., struck a deal to return to his former team at Keith Kunz/Curb-Agajanian Motorsports (KKM) for the first time in three years, seeking to reclaim what slipped away the year before.
Paired with the knowledge and expertise of veteran crew chief and team co-owner Keith Kunz, McIntosh was a model of discipline and consistency in 2024 — winning six Features, recording zero DNFs and stringing together 18 consecutive top-five finishes in the first 18 races. He set new personal-best with the Xtreme Outlaw Series in wins (six), podiums (15) and top-five finishes (20) to clinch his first national championship, redeeming himself to sit atop the national Midget world once again.
“I feel like it’s those times where you’re down on yourself and down on your confidence that shape things like this up,” McIntosh said. “You learn a lot in those seasons. It’s really just about not giving up.”
REUNION
At the dawning of his Midget career, McIntosh drove the flagship car for Dave Mac Motorsports (DMD) — the team owned and operated by his father. For the 2020 season, he took an opportunity to join the driver roster at KKM, and made his mark, winning five races on the national circuit and two Chili Bowl Nationals preliminary features before returning to DMD for 2021.
After a record season in 2022 with DMD — scoring 16 wins across USAC, POWRi and Xtreme — McIntosh returned to chase the Xtreme championship in 2023. Four wins and eight podiums in the first 10 races gave him a 121-point lead in the chase for the championship but struggles over the final 19 races evaporated that lead and knocked him back to a fourth-place finish in the final standings.
With broken spirits and morale running low, McIntosh questioned his future in Midget racing.
“I’m not sure what else I was gonna do, whether I’d go back to my own car, I would have had to find a new crew chief and learn to work together again,” McIntosh said. “I spent a whole year in 2021 learning with (crew chief Robert Dalby) and trying to figure our stuff out; we didn’t really win much. Then, 2022 was kind of our breakout year — we were able to win races and compete up front. Then, in 2023, he informed me that he was leaving, and things just went south after that.”
Soon after the regular season, McIntosh and KKM reconnected and struck a deal with Toyota Racing and Gearwrench to contest the 2024 Chili Bowl Nationals. McIntosh made his third A-Main start in the marquee event as part of the KKM team (2020, 2021, 2024), which then led to a discussion about his return for the regular season.
However, when KKM experienced a departure of multiple star crew chiefs after the Chili Bowl, team management knew others were going to have to step up and fill those roles as more new drivers made commitments to join the team.
And who better to step up than the man who coached so many drivers to numerous open-wheel championships over the last 30 years than Kunz himself.
“For three or four years, I kinda stepped back and let my guys do stuff, and I had to step back in this year,” Kunz said. “I knew if I was gonna step back in, I had to have me a guy that could go win races, and I knew Cannon could win and win championships.”
Kunz has been at the helm of Midget racing’s most decorated team since the late 1990s, having won 17 national Midget titles, including Jade Avedisian’s history-making Xtreme championship in 2023. But after spending a few seasons away from his primary role as head crew chief, Kunz was beginning to feel the itch to get back on the wrenches in pursuit of an 18th championship.
He found his driver, and over the next eight months, he rejuvenated his competitive edge.
“For me, I think a little bit of the excitement was gone because I was so hands-on all my years,” Kunz said. “It’s hard to sit back and watch and sit in the grandstands and not be that hands-on when you’ve done it for that long. That was the thing knowing I was gonna be hands-on, I needed a guy that I could go win with. And I knew Cannon could win.
“It took me a little bit, but having somebody as good as Cannon kinda put the drive back in me. It made me want to go to the races again.”
MATURITY
The new driver-crew chief combo got to work right away, winning their second start together in Xtreme Outlaw Series competition inside the Southern Illinois Center (Du Quoin, Ill.) in March. Though he went to Victory Lane on Saturday night of the two-day event, McIntosh left Du Quoin with some uncertainty, and his crew chief noticed as well.
“Even when we won DuQuoin, the second race of the season, I didn’t feel great; there were a lot of things I had to learn on my end,” McIntosh said. “Even quite a few races after that, I kept trying to tell [Keith] what I wanted to feel out of the car and what I was used to. Finally, it got to the point where I just started listening to him and drove the car how it needed to be driven.”
“When he came back, he was a little nervous I think, a little unsure,” Kunz said. “As the year went on, the maturity in him really kinda showed because he settled into that role — more of the driver role, because in the beginning, he was trying to still be that mechanic a little bit.”
Over the next nine races, McIntosh began to build his record-setting streak of consistency, building his top-five streak up to 11-straight through the first 11 races and scoring another Feature win at 81 Speedway (Wichita, KS) on May 11 after teammate Ryan Timms blew a tire while leading in the closing laps.
Despite the success, Kunz said he felt like the wins were still coming at a premium.
“There was a period there where I was getting him comfortable, but we were losing ground,” Kunz said. “We were starting to run fifth, sixth, and was backing up from the front row in a few of the races. We just didn’t have the speed, more or less we were just kinda hanging in there and getting decent finishes.
“He was comfortable, but we weren’t fast. And there was finally one night I just told him, ‘Comfortable isn’t fast.’ He asked me something about what he should do, and I was like, ‘Dude, you’re the driver. That’s your job. Figure it out.’”
And figure it out, he did. Two weeks after the win at 81, McIntosh delivered his most dominant performance of the season at Atomic Speedway in Ohio, when he led all 25 laps around the high-speed, three-eighths-mile dirt oval to bank his third win of the season, showing a more complete growth as a driver with the ability to both win and tally consistent finishes up front.
“At that point, I think he kinda realized and he changed his whole tune to just more driving and letting me do what I do and trusting my experience,” Kunz said. “And something just all-of-a-sudden clicked. I kinda got back into what I thought we should do, and he fully concentrated on just the driving part of it, and we figured it out pretty quickly at that point.”
McIntosh’s hot streak continued as the summer months began, winning three times in the next five races at Spoon River Speedway (Lewistown, IL), Doe Run Raceway (Doe Run, Mo.) and Arrowhead Speedway in Colcord, Okla. — one where he bested Timms, who was his biggest opponent in the chase for the championship.
“I think after our win at Arrowhead, what we were able to do there and just go out and win with Ryan (Timms) behind us most of the race and he not being able to do much, I was confident in our abilities to be able to just go and flat-out beat him,” McIntosh said. “That told me that we had a good chance at it. He was running second in points, and he was the guy to beat, and we went out and just beat him that night.
“We just continued to build on that win. That was a cool win for me as well, being in my home state in front of family and friends.”
REDEMPTION
After Arrowhead, McIntosh closed-out his 2024 Xtreme Outlaw Series campaign with three more top-five finishes in the final five races and clinched the championship by 156 points over Timms. One week later, he clinched another national championship with POWRi — finally hoisting the championship trophies that slipped through his fingers in the final races of 2023.
“I had a really good year,” McIntosh said. “Obviously, not a lot of things went wrong for us. It was just really good car preparation and the team effort that put us in position every night to either win or be close to winning. It was a team effort that got us here.”
While 2023 is now nothing but a faded memory in his book, McIntosh has honed several of his skills since then and learned a new level of discipline that brought him more consistency to pair with his trips to victory lane in 2024.
“I feel like we’ve just continued to get better and better,” McIntosh said. “We didn’t start winning and then flatline. We’ve always been trying to get better. Keith’s always been looking for new things to improve.”
Kunz was both a witness and a benefactor of McIntosh’s late-season decline in 2023, but still saw his potential. He took that potential and grew it with his own efforts in 2024 and saw his driver evolve from a race winner to a championship closer.
“I think you’ve gotta lose one to really know how to win one,” Kunz said. “That’s the thing is knowing how to win championships. It isn’t your normal mentality of just going racing and racing hard. You really have to have some maturity to win a championship because you’ve gotta take your seconds, your thirds, and not throw away a race. You can’t throw away a top five for a DNF trying to get that win that just ain’t there. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta take what it gives you and settle in.”
Now, McIntosh places his name alongside the other KKM greats of the 21st century. Drake, Clauson, Bell, Larson — the list of open-wheel racing heroes he’s joined goes on for miles, and the path he took to become a part of it is one he won’t forget.
“There’s a lot of big names that have come through Keith and Pete’s stable and a lot of people they’ve put their trust in to go out and do the job,” McIntosh said. “It’s a good feeling when a team like that believes in you to do your job and then you can go out and do it. It’s rewarding, for sure.”