What was a big part of the driving force that led Drake Troutman winning to the 2024 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series Rookie of the Year award? His crew, which consisted of Hunter Cornell, 20; Easton Kalp, 16; and Mason Baer, 15. Troutman and his team all grew up together in their hometown of Hyndman, Pennsylvania.
“Hunter, who was a year ahead of me in high school, began working with me full-time after my dad passed,” Troutman, 19, said. “His dad, Mooch, and my dad were good friends. Me and my crew are learning together. They work hard and want us to succeed in racing.”
Some of those lessons came the hard way. The regional racers learned how to be better prepared on race day.
“When racing on a national level, you better have everything in the trailer that you can possibly need,” said Troutman. “Things need to be clean, organized, and parts and tools have to be easy to locate.”
They also figured out budgeting and how to find sponsors and maintain them.
“I built relationships on the road,” Troutman said. “Product sponsors would get me hooked up with people I did not know. One relationship led to another, and so on, and my product sponsors grew and grew.”
In addition to finding friends that helped introduce Troutman to sponsors, they also helped find knowledgeable allies.
“Going on the road, a lot of people helped us,” said Troutman. “Accu-Force’s Keith Berner and BG Performance’s Vinny Guliani—they taught me the ropes.”
The highlight of Troutman’s 2024 season came during the North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Kentucky. There he placed third. Troutman’s started planning for the 2025 season.
“We now know what it takes to be fully prepared,” Troutman said. “We are really young and inexperienced, but we will put our heads together after the end of the season. There are lots of pieces to this puzzle and we have to get to the point where we are really ready to go. There’s still a learning curve, but we will be better at the start of next season than we were at the start of this season.”
However, competing on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series has been a dream come true for Drake Troutman. It’s one he shared with his late father, D.J., who passed away in 2021 at age 39.
“Every day I think of my dad,” said Troutman. “Racing the Lucas Oil series is something we always talked about someday doing together. I know he was with me all the way this year.”
(For more on D.J. Troutman, read “Drake Troutman: Winning One for Dad.”)
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.
