Sammy Swindell isn’t sure how much runway his legendary career has left but he delivered one last historic performance in the Tulsa Expo Center even if it wasn’t the type of accomplishment anyone wants to be in a position to make.
The 66-year-old suffered a disastrous preliminary effort on Wednesday night. He was involved in an incident with Carter Chevalier, RJ Johnson and Danny Wood in his heat race. He responded by going sixth-to-second in his D-Main and was racing for a transfer in his C when he spun Caleb Saiz and was black-flagged for the transgression.
It was a controversial black flag and one that might have been aided by his 'Slammin' reputation over the year.
Regardless, the five-time champion was up at dawn with the intent to run the alphabet soup and did so in historic fashion. He went down the hill and back up the hill on six different occasions (N-to-I) to tie a record number of features held by JJ Yaley (F-A, 2004), Wayne Johnson (F-A, 2006) and Jason McDougal (I-D, 2021).
The run ended quickly in the I when he was involved in a crash with Kevin Bayer and Rylan Gray. The damage proved too much to overcome.
"It bent the shock," Swindell said. "It was all the way out because the guy behind me was pushing me and then I hit the other car. It was stuck-up and then it didn't want to turn. When you got out of the gas, it just made the car do some weird things. So, I couldn't just race it that way."
Swindell expected to win or contend for the win for the next several mains -- expecting to at least reach the D or C. He felt that convicted in his talents and his Swindell SpeedLab race car.
"It wasn't going to be much different for a while because of the class of cars in those mains, and most of the good cars are in the C and the B, so it wasn't getting harder," Swindell said. "The problem was just finding room and not getting taken out.
"And eventually, I had no place to go and was just the meat in the sandwich -- one in front of me and one behind. It's a shame. We shouldn't have even been in that position for the call they made."
The call, of course, being Matt Ward’s decision to disqualify him on Wednesday. Swindell felt that it was incidental contact. A racing incident.
Nevertheless, Swindell has still shown himself capable of racing near the main event at Tulsa the past half-decade, but he’s also approaching 70-years-old and there has been a drop-off this past season in performance.
How much longer does he want to continue racing Sprint Cars and Midgets?
"I don't know," Swindell said. "You know, I'm right at a point here and some of the circumstances this year might make that decision a little bit easier."
Nevertheless, Swindell said he enjoyed the extended seat time on Saturday. He was just repeatedly adamant that he was capable of racing closer towards the main event.
"It was fun, but it's my job to pass cars, and I was confident enough that we had a car that could race this morning and this afternoon. It's just the same thing -- when there's guys on the top and bottom, there's no place to go, but there were holes and I sprinted through and onto the next one. No problem.
"We were definitely fast, but there's so much traffic and you're trying not to make a mistake, and the two guys in front of me made the mistake."