Austin Kirkpatrick blazing his own trail in Dirt Late Model racing

The standard formula for success in Dirt Late Model racing is to be simply going out and buying one of the well known chassis brands then hitting the track. But doing that only gives a driver and team the same thing that numerous others have. And for driver Austin Kirkpatrick, having the same thing as everyone else just isn’t the formula he is looking for.

The 27-year-old innovator builds his own race cars from the ground up with the hope of finding a winning formula that will place him at the front of the pack. And the results from his latest project indicate that he is well on his way to doing exactly that. But there has been a great deal of experimentation and even some disappointment along the way.

“It’s just called the AK Chassis for now,” Kirkpatrick explained in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “I haven’t come up with anything clever to call it. This is the third car I’ve built. The first one was a generic car with a few things different that I wanted to do and I built that in 2014. Then I went way out in left field with the second car and got little too far out in left field and ended up having to scrap it when things got a little out of whack as far as body measurements. Basically, there was no way to build a body on that chassis without it being illegal in a few spots so I was either going to have to chop that thing up and move some bars out of the way or start over and build another one. I said ‘screw it’, I’ll build another one.”

The Charlotte, NC resident then went back to the drawing board and produced his third car. And with this machine, Kirkpatrick has turned some heads. Top-5 finishes have almost become the norm in the limited number of starts he has been able to make to this point. A $7,500 win in a Carolina Clash Dirt Late Model Series feature at South Carolina’s Cherokee Speedway has been the crowning achievement to this point.

A strong runner-up finish to Mike Marlar in a Schaeffer’s Oil Fall Nationals race at Smoky Mountain Speedway in early September and a 5th place effort in the recent Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series event at the Maryville, Tenn. track this past weekend are also listed among the successes of this newest AK Chassis.

“So this is the third one,” Kirkpatrick pointed out. “It’s been pretty good so far in the four or five races we’ve finished. We’ve been working a lot of bugs out. But in the four or five races we’ve finished I think I’ve gotten a sixth place, a second place, a win, and this was a fifth place. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. We’ll keep tweaking on it and working on it to make it better.”

So why not just follow that formula of buying a standard chassis rather building his own?

“Two things,” Kirkpatrick replied. “The first is the cost. Those things are pretty expensive and they’re definitely getting a pretty penny for a new car these days. And the second part is that I feel like the race car is probably 60 to 70% of what contributes to the success of the team with the driver being 30 to 40%. I knew that I wasn’t going to go out there and outdrive Brandon Overton and Brandon Sheppard and Jonathan Davenport and a lot of these other guys. But I knew they were all driving the same cars, pretty much, either a Longhorn or a Rocket. I figured if I could build something better than that, I might have a good shot at being successful.”

Kirkpatrick has in fact driven other brands of cars besides his own during his racing career.

“Those cars are mass produced and they’re built for the masses and they’re built trying to hit as big of a sweet spot as possible to have a car that works in as many track conditions and as many track configurations as possible,” Kirkpatrick declared. “You can’t build a car that’s only good at one thing and sell it to the public in case those guys want to go run a race that’s on a track that’s not like the configuration you built the car for.”

The young builder says that he has engineered his current car to be best in certain conditions. The hope is to perfect one type of situation then move on to another.

“We built this car for a few specific kind of scenarios and we’re trying to get as good as we can,” he said. “We go to as many races as we can on track profiles that fit what we’re looking for so we can keep learning and keep figuring out what this car likes and doesn’t like.”

Kirkpatrick’s car is setup to fit his driving style, and as a result, he seeks out those conditions when choosing where to race.

“I kind of catfish, I like running the bottom,” he stated. “I like running a lot straighter so I’ve incorporated some things into this car to make it drive like I want it to drive. So far, it’s a very straight race car and it seems to be pretty good when there’s a bottom groove that’s actually usable. That’s where we’ve been fast when we’ve been to tracks that suit our style.”

Even though he has built a car that, for now, best suits his driving style, he says there could come a day in which he might considering selling AK Chassis cars.

“A lot of stuff has to happen for that to be a goal because we have to build a pretty big notebook for this thing so we could actually feel confident selling it to a customer,” he explained. “They might not be racing on the same tracks we’re racing on so we need to have a good enough array of adjustments to dial in and have a list of things we can do to the car to make it handle one way or another so that other people who don’t drive the same way can be successful with it. Right now, we’re just having fun. We’re going out there with a little band of misfits crew guys.”

Where did the knowledge that has given him the ability to build a car that has already found success come from?

“I say that I’m a pseudo engineer. I’m a fake engineer. I don’t actually have an engineering degree but I just like engineering stuff. I read a lot and watch a lot of videos in regard to engineering related subjects. But no, I don’t have an engineering related background. For all intents and purposes, I’m making it up as I go.”

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