The long-awaited return of the American Sprint Car Series National Tour to Riverside International Speedway is finally here, as “The Ditch” is back on the schedule for the first time in three years.
Given the tour’s absence in recent seasons, more than half of the Series full-timers have no prior Riverside experience entering this weekend’s World Short Track Challenge. One driver not on that list is Memphis’s own Landon Britt, who began his Sprint Car career in 2018 competing in Riverside’s 305 Sprint Car division.
But even with that experience, for what to expect this weekend, Britt said his guess is no better than anyone else’s.
“You can’t really expect anything,” Britt said. “One week you can have a hammer down, heavy track, 15 inches all day and then the next week you can have glass slick, 10 or 11 inches all day. It’s a very wild track to know what’s going to come. Then, also with the river being there, you have to watch how high the river gets. Kind of like down in Florida, the higher the tide, the wetter the track. It’s a guessing game.”
One of the few drivers in the field with more laps around Riverside than Britt is Greenbrier, AR’s Jordon Mallett, who has been a frequent visitor to the track throughout his 15-year Sprint Car career and has two United Sprint Car Series wins in West Memphis on his resume. He preached the same message as Britt, emphasizing the importance of keeping up with the unpredictable Riverside track surface.
“It’s a flip of the coin, honestly,” Mallett said. “I’ve seen that place be anything and everything. It’s just dependent on what they do with the place.”
For Britt, the opportunity to sleep in his own bed after a night of racing is a welcome change of pace after spending the last three seasons traveling thousands of miles across the country chasing the National Tour.
“Always good to be closer to home and hopefully do well in front of your home crowd,” Britt said. “It makes it easier on us. We have the availability of anything we need if something happened, any help, things like that.”
The 2024 season has been a roller coaster for the No. 10 team, with three top fives mixed in with a handful of crashes and mechanical gremlins along the way. He currently sits seventh in the standings, the same spot in which he ended 2023.
Britt is focused on building momentum in the final 10 races of the season to propel the team into 2025 with a full head of steam, and there would be no better place to kickstart that upward trajectory than his home track.
“It’s had its ups and downs,” Britt said. “We’ve really played around with [the car] a lot and dove deeper into our fine tuning, trying to find new things. We’re trying not to get too caught up in the points, because then you just kind of stay in your own box. We really want to get out of it and learn. If it falls back for us a little bit this year, then hopefully it gains us next year.”
Mallett’s season has also taken plenty of unexpected turns, many of them having nothing to do with his on-track performance. His original plan was to take a hiatus from running the full National Tour with a newborn baby at home, but he ended up joining the Series anyway for eight races in the seat of the No. 55B while Brandon Anderson healed from an injury. Mallett didn’t take long to get comfortable in his new surroundings, with a last-lap pass for the win at Batesville Motor Speedway highlighting his substitute stint in the car.
The last stop on tour at Arrowhead Speedway marked Mallett’s first National Tour races back behind the wheel of his own No. 14 car. He was a contender all weekend, collecting finishes of fifth on Friday and seventh on Saturday.
While laps in a Sprint Car are helpful regardless of which car they come in, Mallett touched on the need to compartmentalize the two teams when switching from one to another.
“There’s just some things different,” Mallett said. “For the most part, everybody’s got good equipment. There’s some things that carried over there with me when I went, and there’s some things that carried back. I know what I like in my own car, and theirs drives a little different than mine.”
Mallett will follow the National Tour to Riverside this weekend looking for his second Series win of the year and first in his own equipment. With the World Short Track Challenge being a co-sanctioned event with the USCS – where Mallett has two championships and 25 wins to his name – he has all the motivation in the world to get the job done in one of the top events on either schedule.
“It’s cool, it’s like, where do you draw your association at,” Mallett said. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time with both series. It’s just a cool deal. I’m just more excited about another big 360 race. That’s super beneficial, we need big races, so hopefully it’ll turn out to be a really good event.”
More than 50 of the top 360 Sprint Car teams in the nation will join Britt and Mallett in West Memphis, AR for the World Short Track Challenge at Riverside International Speedway on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 27-28. Tickets will be available at the track on race day, but if you can’t make it to the track, catch every lap live on DIRTVision.
