Tyler Blank is no stranger to victory lane at Double X Speedway in California, Missouri. He has won every sprint car feature but three in the last three years at the track. Flat tires sidelined Blank in two of those races he didn’t finish first. During last Sunday’s season opener, he topped a field of 17 winged sprint cars. Afterwards, Blank performed a couple of donuts in front of a full-house crowd.
“Fans get tired of the same person winning,” Blank, 35, of California, Missouri, said. “I’ve raced Double X for 20 years, and I’ve got it down. So, I try to pump them up. I’ll do donuts, pop wheelies, and do crazy things for the fans. I’m seeing more and more of them sticking around to see what I do after winning.”
Blank makes it a challenge to hate someone who wins so much. On Sunday morning, he pumped water from the infield to help save the show after two inches of rain fell days before the event. Before the season started, Blank trucked in dirt to build a new surface at Double X Speedway. His day job, which typically involves digging graves, had a special assignment when he was called to make a lake.
“It isn’t every day that you dig a lake, and the soil was really good,” Blank said. “I got to thinking that Double X hadn’t had new surface in a while.”
If that doesn’t help make you cheer for Blank, maybe his paint scheme will.
“It is a salute to my dad, Larry, who passed in 2018,” said Blank. “He was a sprint car driver in the 1960s and we had success locating two of his old sprint cars.”
As with Blank, his father raced sprint cars, too. In 1998, Tyler’s sister, Debbie Bledsoe, found one sprint car in a salvage yard and bought it and took it to her home. In 2016, Blank dragged it from the weeds, and restored it. Now he has his father’s first and second sprint cars.
“I wanted to give my car a patina look this season because we found the old cars in faded condition,” Blank said. “I changed my number to 4, my dad’s number, exactly the way it looked on his cars back then.”
Tyler Blank said he plans to travel a little less than past years. He and his wife, Kelsey, have a newborn son, Maverick, whom Blank hopes to create as many fond memories with as his father did with him.
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.
