Racing veteran Bryce Vowan said the best decision he made in the sport was moving from winged 360 sprint cars to mod lites. He saved a bucket of money and jumped into a barrel of fun.
“We were struggling with our family-owned sprint car, doing what we could do to race on a limited budget,” Vowan, of Memphis, Tennessee, said. “We gave up sprint car racing [in 2016] but it wasn’t long before we missed being at the tracks.”
The following year, in 2017, Vowan bought a used mod lite for $7,000.
“It took us half the year to make the car work properly,” said Vowan. “In the second half of the season, we started finishing in the top five and won two features.”
Prior to the 2019 season, Vowan and his stepfather, Mike Campbell, bought a mod lite kit for $3,500 from Pro Race Cars, of Hanoverton, Ohio. They assembled it themselves.
“It was our first brand-new race car,” Vowan said. “Pro Race Cars’ Darrel Lewis helped us out tremendously with advice. I told him what I was looking for and that we didn’t have a lot of money.”
They transferred their old car’s engine, drivetrain, and suspension to the new car. Racing with the local club, Mod Lites of Arkansas, Vowan found success with his new ride. He won the Mod Light Nationals at I-30 Speedway in Little Rock, Arkansas at the end of 2019. It earned him more than a $5,000 check.
“I told [my fiancée] Amy that if I won the Nationals, I would buy her a puppy,” said Vowan, who now has Nola, a miniature Australian Shepherd, as part of the team.
This past season Bryce Vowan won six more features. His expenses for the year included only one set of tires and two to three gallons of E85 fuel each weekend.
“We broke even and had fun,” Vowan, who works as a UPS driver, said. “That is why I love mod lite racing”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
