Emerson Axsom may have asked the silliest question ever upon winning the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals on Saturday night upon being greeted by team owner and crew chief Kevin Swindell in Victory Lane.
Are we coming back together next year?
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Axsom was completely serious and Swindell was incredulous. But really, it was a reasonable question because Axsom raced this event in 2025 with Keith Kunz Motorsports which reduced their fleet size in advance of the 2026 race.
He knew before leaving the building last year that he was going to race with Swindell in 2026 so it only stood to reason that he needed to lock down a deal that proved so immediately successful.
Again, Swindell just couldn’t believe the question.
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“Like, come on dude, I think you’re good,” Swindell said of that conversation on the stage.
Beyond the obvious of wanting to stay in a car that just produced the biggest achievement of his career, Axsom also simply wants to stay with a group of racers that immediately felt like his home.
“You just never know, so I had to ask him,” Axsom said. “I’m just so happy to be part of what they are building. Kevin could have asked any driver in this building and it was a huge honor that he asked me.”
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To win this race, Axsom needed to fend off a teammate in Logan Seavey, who had done nothing but lend the knowledge that won this race in 2023 and 2024 to an effort that arguably decreased his chances of winning.
Instead of rejecting it, Seavey made himself available all week to debrief with Axsom and teammates Jett Barnes and Kyle Cummins. Seavey wanted to make sure that a Swindell Speedlab car won this race even if he wasn’t the one driving it.
What makes that spirit all the more unique is that Axsom literally needed to drive Seavey down to the curb in Turn 4. It was an aggressive move on a guy that had done literally everything to put him in that spot.
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And to the credit of Seavey, that was fair game with a Golden Driller trophy on the line
“If I was a foot closer in the corner, I’d probably win the Chili Bowl and I’m standing over there,” Seavey said pointing at Axsom. “He did everything he needed to do win, turning left because I got under him, I tried to root him out of the way but he was able to pick up the cushion quicker.
“That’s just hard racing for the Chili Bowl. He’s doing what he can to protect his spot after making a big mistake, and I’m trying to win the race too.”
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For Swindell watching from the ramp, this was equal parts euphoria and sheer hell. On one hand, the whole point of having four cars was to be in this exact scenario but the four-time race winner never considered what it would be like watching them literally bounce off each other down the backstretch.
“It was miserable,” Swindell said. “Like, I love coming back here, but I feel like I understand why Zak Brown is a headcase because it’s the same thing. I have been at this with Logan, four years in my stuff but four years before in my dad’s cars, and it’s always been me and him versus the world.
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“And then we get there, and now I’m making him race against a twin to his car, so it’s just odd, right?
“I want them to race, and to run 1-2, but watching it was such an odd experience because I just didn’t want both of them to get beat racing each other. I didn’t care who won, but then it’s nerve wracking because I feel excited to win with Emerson and then I felt like I let Logan down.”
He probably used the word ‘odd’ another dozen times, but you get the point.
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Obviously, Axsom has nothing to complain about, but the fact that Seavey was amongst the first five people in victory lane to congratulate his teammate and owner spoke volumes.
“Man, he has been such a great person to me all week,” Axsom said. “Seriously. On my prelim night, he was watching the races and was telling me which lines were fastest in the previous race.
“He knows these cars are fast enough, and I think he knows that I’m good enough that if I’m in the front, I am going to be hard to pass and he still stuck his neck out and did what was best for me and Kevin.”
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Axsom repeated the narrative he shared on Wednesday that this is the first time he has driven for a team that wasn’t a group of individuals but under the same banner. He was so appreciative that he could race Seavey that way and get a hug for it in Victory Lane.
“He is genuinely happy for Kevin and you love to see people like Logan in racing because it’s rare to find someone that is all about the team,” Axsom said. “That’s the reason why we had so much success this weekend, and maybe this is the next Swindell duo at the Chili Bowl, and it’s me and Logan.”
The first Swindell duo, of course, was Kevin and Sammy with their nine combined wins behind the wheel.
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But in this moment, above everything else he feels, Axsom can’t over the fact that people keep calling him ‘Chili Bowl Champion Emerson Axsom,’ because he recognizes what is attached to that.
Rich Vogler
Sammy Swindell
Tony Stewart
Kevin Swindell
Bryan Clauson
Rico Abreu
Christopher Bell
Kyle Larson
Logan Seavey
He’s one of them now, and like each of those winners, will be subject to questions about whether or not he wants to go NASCAR racing or continue on his path to racing in a marquee Sprint Car national tour.
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“If the opportunity came up, I would entertain racing anything,” Axsom said. “But at the end of the day, my dream is to win the World of Outlaws championship. That was my dream as a kid. What I learned today is what it takes to win these big races.
“It took Kyle 13 years to win here, and after that, he is now winning everything he races in. I feel like learning to win here is a major step to achieving all the other things. I got some lucky breaks too, right?
“I drew a ‘2’ for the pill dash and only had to race Kyle and Logan, but that means I had to beat Kyle and Logan too.”
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Legacy defining win
In a different universe, one where Swindell is forced out of competitive driving due to a crash in the Knoxville Nationals, he is surely more than a four-time winner of the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals.
He was 26-years-old that night in 2015 and appeared poised to add to greatness in the form of a Sprint Car or NASCAR career, both which were still on the table, but more Golden Drillers seemed inevitable.
And here they are, but just in a different form, as now Swindell Speedlab has added three to those first four. In a manner of speaking, Swindell has now won seven of the little golden guys, making him the most prolific competitor in the history of the building.
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They aren’t all the same, of course, but they do all count and they count for those whose lives he is now impacting.
“It’s different because back then, it was sort of like making my dreams come true,” Swindell said. “Now, I am making some kid’s dream come true to an extent, and that will live on forever with Logan and Emerson.
“We put Jett (Barnes) on a national stage this week and Kyle Cummins is as good as anyone in this building too. The cool part for me now is that I get to accelerate their careers and do something for them.
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“I know how it was for me when I was younger, with all the rental rides, and how hard it is to find opportunities for some of these kids. I love the fact that we’re able to show up, put them in good cars, have a chance to win the Chili Bowl, and if they crash, it is what it is.”
There has to be some degree of personal satisfaction too because Kevin left Sammy’s program in part due to a conviction that some of the ideas he wanted to try with Seavey had merit.
He just needed the room to expound upon those concepts.
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“With my dad’s stuff, I never saw those cars until I got to the building most years, and it’s like ‘okay, this is his program,’ and I and Logan would make some of our own adjustments on the air, bars and turns, but never had control of where the stuff was place.
“I watched everything in this building, and looked at a lot of pictures, and you look at what Tanner (Thorson) had done the year before so I had an idea. I took some of those things and paired it with what I learned on what my dad’s stuff used to be.”
Now, Swindell Speedlab is doing what Sammy Swindell Racing used to do in this building, and now even looks like the new Keith Kunz Motorsports and CB Industries, parked nearly in between both in the center row.
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With that said, this will likely stay a four-car effort next year too.
“Tonight was better but it was still hectic to make sure I was doing everything to give everyone their due diligence,” Swindell said. “I wanted everyone to be equally prepared for the feature, and I feel like I gave them all justice for what they were doing, and another car would be doable but …
“It would probably need to be a crazy amount of money that someone shows up with to make me come back with more than four.”
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What happened?
Larson led the first two laps from the pole but Axsom took the lead on Lap 4. Running second, Larson would flip when he ran into the back of a slow CJ Leary, who was battling a flat tire.
“I haven’t seen anything but he was slowing and like, I saw his right front was flat,” Larson said. “So then I was just kind of trying to get under him and just clipped his rear bumper with my right front and it just turned me into the wall. It is what it is.”
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Justin Grant had battled Larson, Seavy and Axsom all race and actually was making the pass for the win with seven to go when an incident involving Cummins denied him. Seavey would get Grant on the next restar and Grant ended up crashed at the end of that sequence.
Daison Pursley was penalized from third behind Axsom and Seavey on a restart with two laps to go. Seavey benefitted from it. Purlsey was penalized for it.
Seavey advocated after the race that Pursley shouldn’t have been penalized.
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Double soup history
Saturday afternoon was also the greatest day in the history of the alphabet soup as two drivers claimed the record for most feature races participated.
But there was also more to it.
Darin Naida drove from O-Feature 1 to G-Feature 1 and was largely joined simultaneously by Mack Leopard, who drove from N-Feature 1 to F-Feature 1.
Naida said ‘it was pretty good’ and was trying to ‘stay calm’ throughout the run.
“I just knew that if I got too excited, I was going to do something I shouldn’t,” he said. “It was tough. Two cars got tight in front of me and I just needed a couple of different things to fall my way.”
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The record was then set at nine, breaking the mark established in 2023 by Kris Carroll’s seven features, moving from an N-Main all the way to the H-Main and gaining 61 positions.
Naida said he wanted Leopard behind him to get to 10, a mark that he also ultimately fell short of, by one position after the track got reworked for lunch. However, in addition to tying the record of nine races, Leopard also won four features on Saturday and gained a net total of 73 races.
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“It just sucks to have that happen,” Leopard said. “At the end of the day, the records I set was pretty sweet.”
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