Q: You started your career in mini-outlaw karts on the West Coast, much like Kyle Larson and Rico Abreu did. What makes that class such a popular stepping-stone for younger drivers out west?
Hirst: Well, I think a lot of it is about positioning, to be honest with you. Where I’m located (in Paradise), you can run pretty much year-round in a go-kart, between Cycleland Speedway and then you can go run at Red Bluff (Indoor Karting) during the winter. There are probably four or five other tracks out there that run karts pretty regularly too around this area.
For kids growing up, it’s just a great platform to race on and learn how to race. I always felt that the outlaw karts – they don’t have suspension, by any means, but you had to be either leaning on the cushion or really patient on the bottom. All those skills get you ready for a midget or a sprint car, anything of that sort.
All in all, they’re just a great learning ground. As you’ve seen in recent years, we’ve had a lot of guys come up into higher levels of the sport from these ranks … even someone like Tanner Carrick, who’s doing that now and racing a sprint car out here and then a midget in USAC. A lot of people have proven that it can be done and that you can carry a career forward in a lot of cases from there.
Q: Reflect a little bit on your season last year; was it everything you could have hoped for?
Hirst: Last year really was a great year. I’m fortunate to have built such a great relationship with Roth Motorsports; we’re going on five or six years of partnership now and they’ve always been good to me. It’s a situation that just seems to keep getting better and better the more we work together.
Racing with Dennis and Teresa (Roth) last year, we were able to pick up our first Outlaws win, got the Sprint Car Challenge Tour championship and scored more than 10 wins together. It was a solid year out here in California. As a racer, you always want to get more wins and more championships, but for what we set out to accomplish I feel like we made a great mark and I’m really happy with everything we did.
Q: Last year’s Gold Cup Race of Champions (at Silver Dollar Speedway) was emotional for you and for the team. What was that night like and what do you remember about your first World of Outlaws win?
Hirst: There’s many races that, because I’ve been doing this for so long now, I’ve won and even forgotten, just because of racing so often and visiting so many different places throughout each year. But that night at Chico, I’ll never forget it.
We’d run good with the Outlaws over the years; there had been times when we’d run second or third and finish solidly in the top five, and then there were other nights when they’d come in and kick our butts and make us wonder what we were doing wrong out there. Either way, we just hadn’t found that last little bit that we needed.
To finally get one … Shane (Stewart) kept sliding me and fighting me back and forth for a long time in that one, but I knew I didn’t want him to steal it from me, so I just had to go out there and lay it all on the line to try and seal the deal. Thankfully it all worked out; even though there was a time or two during the battle when I wasn’t sure if it was going to all come together.
Adding my name to the list of guys who have won an Outlaws race was a pretty surreal moment. You know, they released the updated win list recently after they did the recount of a lot of the past races, but all I knew was I still had one (win) and they couldn’t take that away from me.