Ryan King
Ryan King has accomplished plenty in his relatively short time on the dirt tracks of east Tennessee and beyond. The Seymour, Tenn. driver has won the Late Model track championship at his hometown 411 Motor Speedway as well as finishing fourth overall in last year’s NeSmith Chevrolet Weekly Racing Series standings. He was also named Rookie of the Year by the Southern Regional Racing Series in 2013.
At the same time, however, the 23-year-old is open to the idea of trying new things. With that in mind, the driver who currently ranks third in the NeSmith Touring Series standings made his way to Dillon Motor Speedway in South Carolina on Monday to test drive a NASCAR Camping World Series truck on that 4/10 mile paved oval.
So how did this opportunity arise?
“I was on the internet looking at race car stuff and I came across an ad from a NASCAR team that was looking for development drivers so I went to their website and looked up their stuff,” King explained in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “It said to email them with some information they wanted to know so I thought ‘what the heck, I’ll email them’.
“I didn’t figure I’d ever hear back from them but I emailed anyway, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later they called me back and wanted to know if I’d be interested in coming to do a test session,” the driver added. “We ended up scheduling it but it got rained out when they had that storm come through there a couple of weeks ago so we finally went over there on Monday of this week.”
After a miscommunication between the two parties that actually caused each to show up at a different track, the driver and Level 1 Motorsports finally got together in Dillon late in the afternoon on Monday.
“When I got there they had the truck ready and everything,” King recalled. “They went over everything with me about driving lines and braking points. Their main guy gave me about a thirty minute talk over all of that. When I finally got in the truck he told me to make a couple of laps just cruising around to get a feel for it then he would give a two-to-go and I was supposed to pick the pace up a little bit.”
The team had a clear set of guidelines they wanted to go by during the session that included testing driver discipline as well as ability.
“He had told me some lap times he wanted to shoot for and he would walk me down on the times,” King said of the test. “He wanted me to do about a 22-second lap to start with then go down by a half-second or so from there until he got me down to a 20-second lap. Then he wanted to back me back up because they are looking for somebody who can manage their lap times.”
Finally, the time arrived to put man and machine to the test.
“When they told me to go green, I took off for the first lap and thought I would go easy,” the driver stated. “So I went into the first corner at what I thought was easy and it got loose. I was expecting more grip than a dirt car and that thing had less grip. I eased it down into the next corner and made a good turn there, but by the time I went back to the back straightaway something broke. I reckon the transmission blew out of it.”
Both driver and team were frustrated by the mechanical failure. As a result of how things turned out on this occasion, a second session has been scheduled for early June.
Ryan King can normally be found flying around dirt tracks in his Late Model
As for comparisons to the Late Model cars he is used to, King said that even in the short time he was behind the wheel he saw that there was little comparison at all.
“It’s totally different,” he declared of driving a truck on pavement and a Late Model on dirt. “I was expecting more grip and it wasn’t there. I felt like I was crawling. They had it tuned down. It wasn’t a ton of horsepower, but it was enough to get you loose when you got on the gas.”
All in all, King enjoyed his first ever taste of racing on asphalt. However, dirt is more than likely where he will continue to race in the near future.
“It was a cool experience,” he said. “It’s not something I would push hard for. I just thought I’d email them and see what happened.”
