*Interview provided by Knoxville Raceway announcer Kris Krug.
Josh Richards enters this weekend’s World of Outlaws Late Models World Finals in Charlotte with his fourth series championship all but locked up. Further, the all time feature wins leader on the WoO circuit has an opportunity to establish a new single-season record for most victories should he capture one of the features over the course of the three day event and add to the 17 series wins he has already compiled in 2016.
Josh Richards
Along with the wins he has achieved on his regular series, the Shinnston, WV native has also brought home trophies from the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series when his schedule has allowed him to race on that tour. Further, he scored wins in the crown jewel USA Nationals at the Cedar Lake Speedway in Wisconsin as well as the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury American Legion Speedway in Illinois. So needless to say, it has been a stellar campaign for the driver of the Rocket Chassis house car.
“They’re both really stout,” Richards said of both of the major tours. “We’ve got over 20 wins this year between the two. It’s been a phenomenal year. It’s always different because you race with a group of guys and you kind of get used to running a certain speed but then when you show up with different groups of guys you get to see where you stack up. This year we’ve been really good everywhere we’ve been so it’s a matter of trying to keep that speed up.”
Due to injury, Richards missed virtually all of the 2014 racing season. That put the star driver and his team a bit behind the competition going into the 2015 campaign. But now the No. 1 operation appears to be on top of its game.
“I think last year we played a lot of catch up,” Richards explained in an interview conducted by Knoxville Raceway announcer Kris Krug for InsideDirtRacing.com. “It was a quiet season. We finished second in the points and won eleven races last year and still ran well. We had a good year, but we just went kind of under the radar because we spent most of the year trying to figure out what we needed to do.”
One of the things Richards and his father decided to do was back to the drawing board and create a new racing machine. The Rocket XR1 was the result of those efforts out of the Mark Richards led chassis shop located in West Virginia.
Josh Richards in the Rocket house car
“We came out and designed a new chassis over the winter for this year and we fired right off in Florida,” Richards explained. “It was fast right from the get-go in SpeedWeeks and we’ve just carried that momentum throughout the season.”
As a matter of fact, the new car was so good that Richards had won six races before the calendar had tripped over to March. Those early season victories came in Georgia and Florida on both the World of Outlaws Late Models tour as well as the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.
Does Richards feel any pressure to claim at least one checkered flag this weekend to break the season win total held by Darrell Lanigan?
“We’re just going out and racing. There’s always pressure because you want to win and do well for everyone involved, but we just go out there and try to have fun and do what we can.”
