Winning a national championship isn’t easy, as 2025 champ Cole Falloway can attest to. However, he took the hard route to the DIRTcar UMP title. Falloway wanted to race for the most points and money. That meant racing three or more hours away from his home in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Falloway admitted he could have competed at tracks closer to home. Instead, he said, he ventured to Illinois every weekend. Three hours to the Brownstown Bullring. Four and a half to Farmer City Raceway. Nearly six to Spoon River Speedway.
“If you want to be the best, you have to beat the best,” Falloway said. “That’s why we traveled to Illinois”
His schedule included tracks even farther away. DIRTcar Nationals in Florida. Salina Highbanks Speedway in Oklahoma. Needmore Speedway in Georgia. Mississippi Thunder Speedway in Wisconsin. Bedford Speedway in Pennsylvania.
While Falloway went to school for engineering, to find the time to race, he runs a salvage yard his late grandfather used to run.
Cole Falloway finished the year with 20 wins among 61 races in DIRTcar UMP competition. His biggest win came at Fairbury Speedway in August.
“It is just so hard to win at Fairbury,” Falloway said. “You’ve got drivers like Curt Spalding and Trent Young to contend with. The place is so cool — it’s aways full of people. Racing with the best modified drivers and winning in front of a crowd like [makes it] meaningful.”
In the end, Cole Falloway won not only the DIRTcar UMP modified national championship, but also the MARS modified title, too.
“Winning both the DIRTcar and MARS championships put us well over $100,000 this year,” Falloway said. “That’s pretty good.”
Falloway has a new modified on order from Elite Chassis, but the off-season won’t be a time for him to slow down. He will keep his skills sharp by racing karts with his friend Tyler Nicely.
“I feel growing up in karts helped me be a better modified driver,” Falloway said. “Karts teach a driver to be smooth, and how to use the gas and brake together. Now that Tyler and I are modified racers, racing karts not only keeps us busy in the off-season but keeps us sharp for the upcoming modified season.”
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.
