BENTON, Ark. (Aug. 10, 2024) – The smile in victory lane belonged to Dustin Stuart.
The smile the next morning belonged to his daughter Scarlette.
Stuart won Saturday’s IMCA Sunoco Stock Car feature at Batesville Motor Speedway, his first sanctioned checkers since 2021. After a two-hour tow home to Benton, the trophy went straight to the bedroom of six-year-old Scarlette, who woke up to find it early … too early … the next morning.
“She came in our bedroom, jumped on top of me and said ‘You got me a trophy!’ She was ecstatic,” said Stuart. “We’d gotten home about three in the morning and this was at 8 a.m. I wasn’t ready to get woken up quite that early.”
A five-time feature winner and the first-ever Stock Car state champion crowned in Arkansas in 2020, Stuart dialed up GRT and inquired about getting a new car after realizing he’d be eligible to qualify for the IMCA Speedway Motors Super Nationals fueled by Casey’s Race of Champions.
He picked up that ride, the first one off the new jig at Green Briar, on the way to Boone Speedway and did his best to get acclimated as quickly as he could, turning 18 laps on three motors and two different sets of gears.
“I don’t think anybody worked as hard as we did to get qualified. We never gave up,” said Stuart, who borrowed that third motor from Randy Weaver.
“Everything about Stock Cars was new to Arkansas drivers when Batesville and Little Rock sanctioned. We did a lot of testing throughout the season and put our knowledge together from what we had learned from over the years and went to work,” said Stuart, who ran partial schedules each of the last two seasons. “We’ve been through the ringer at times with this car. We’ve had issues with motors and I’ve been upside down once, too.”
Stuart is still behind the wheel of that original “GRT starting point” car and he’s still wearing the same Velocita driver’s suit he won in the drawing for first-time state champions four years ago.
Saturday’s win came from outside row two and ahead of 15th starting Tony Anglin, Joe Payne and Chris Dollarhide.
“It was definitely much needed. We’ve been working hard on finding a setup that works,” said Stuart, who ran three-wide with Payne and Dollarhide on his way to the front, then pulled away once he got there. “It was a very exciting race and a very rewarding win for us.”
Stuart followed his father and now crew chief Sammy into racing. Jake Osburn is the right-hand man on the crew and wife Brittany is the one who “does a heck of a job putting up with me.”
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