KNOXVILLE, IA — When things go right for Donny Schatz at the Knoxville Nationals, they go right in a big way for the 11-time Nationals Champion. But Saturday night’s 50-lap feature just continued what had been a bad week for Schatz as he finished 13th in the 24-car field.
Schatz started 21st, just like he did in 2013 when he won for the seventh time at The Granddaddy of Them All. The second go-around wasn’t as successful as the No. 15 Tony Stewart Racing machine never quite got through the field. Schatz was the penultimate car on the lead lap with only Logan Schuchart behind him as a buffer to race winner Kyle Larson.
“We were rolling here that week (in 2013) almost every time, this week we just weren’t rolling the way we needed to be,” Schatz said. “So, not gonna cross your fingers and things will just work themselves out so we’ll have to keep working at it.”
The 10-time World of Outlaws champion wasn’t up to speed all week at Knoxville, finishing ninth in last Sunday’s Capitani Classic before coming home 18th in his Wednesday night A-Main, leading to Schatz’s first Hard Knox Night showing since 1997.
That Hard Knox Night appearance on Friday night led to a dominating performance from the North Dakota native, who convincingly won the feature to start Saturday night’s A-Main in 21st place. However, that Hard Knox performance was a bit of a false dawn.
“I fought the same thing earlier that I fought Sunday night at the [Capitani Classic] feature [and] Wednesday night in the feature,” Schatz said. “Last night we didn’t fight it, but we were in clean air out on our own so we were able to manipulate the car a little bit different so yeah, we changed a lot of things, just didn’t make the progress we needed to, so that’s the way racing is.”
Wheelspin was Schatz’s Achilles heel at Knoxville in 2024. The team has been working for years trying to get the Ford powerplant to deliver power as intended, but progress is being made, even if some might say the results have gone backward since Schatz won at Knoxville in 2022.
“We’re on to a lot of things, we’re learning a lot of things, we’re getting a lot of motor things situated the way we want,” Schatz said. “So hopefully we just keep building and building and building and next year when we roll around the building blocks are there for it.”
While Schatz’s end result wasn’t what he had hoped, he wasn’t alone. The vereran…
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