Rico Abreu and Tony Stewart Are Finally Teaming Up

2 of the most revered people in all of dirt track racing, Rico Abreu and Tony Stewart, are teaming up together for the very 1st time. Abreu will drive for Stewart for the upcoming Kubota High Limit Racing Series season. Right after, 1 of Sprint Car’s most respected drivers walked away from TSR too.

Tony Stewart’s Recent Rough Patch as a Team Owner

At the end of the 2024 Cup Series season, two-time champions Stewart-Haas Racing would either shut down or the Stewart part would shut down. Haas continued as a 1-car mid-pack team, a shadow of its former self. When Tony Stewart co-owned the team, they earned 2x Cup Champs, 69 Cup Wins, 1x Daytona 500, 3x Brickyard 400, 2x Southern 500, 1x Xfinity Champs, and 26 Xfinity Wins, an impressive resume that made their winless final seasons all the more frustrating and heartbreaking.

While on his dirt team, he recently received some news that hit the racing world hard. When dirt icon and legend Donny Schatz would be leaving Tony Stewart’s sprint car team! Schatz has been racing for the Indiana native since 2008, a partnership that lasted almost 2 decades. That partnership netted Schatz and Stewart 8 WoO titles and 234 feature wins, but they decided to end it this year. “Making a change now gives each of us the chance to reset and refocus before 2026.” Hear from team owner Tony Stewart below.

“Donny has been an incredible part of TSR for nearly two decades; he’s helped build this organization into what it is today. But in the past few years, we’ve weathered changes in the sport, and our performance hasn’t been at the level that both Donny and I expect. We’re both competitors to our core, and we both hold ourselves to a high standard of performance that we’ve struggled to obtain.” Stewart’s words show appreciation and disdain for how things have been going. But that’s what makes Rico Abreu’s signing such a turning point!

Rico Abreu’s Team Switch

Rico Abreu has an impressive resume himself, which makes him dirt track racing’s littlest big star. Most notably, he won back-to-back Chili Bowls in 2015 and 2016 and actually won Toyota its 1st ever Chili Bowl! He earned the 2014 USAC National Midget Series championship and even won the Belleville Midget Nationals.

He even won a K&N Pro Series East race in 2015 and has a successful WoO career of his own. With 20 feature wins on the resume. But his move to TSR will mark Abreu’s debut in the Kubota High Limit Racing Series.The third major dirt racing series in Abreu’s career. The series has only been around since 2022 but is quickly looking to become the biggest series in dirt track racing.

Abreu and Stewart’s switch to the Kubota High Limit Racing Series!

Tony Stewart and Rico Abreu have been World of Outlaws warriors for a while now, and their switching series should not be as shocking. But yet it isn’t, and how come? This massive shake-up in the dirt world has occurred with barely a whisper in recent years, but it deserves more discussion.In 2022, the series was founded by the best racing driver in the world, Kyle Larson, and dirt track legend Brad Sweet, to build a more sustainable and profitable ecosystem for sprint car racing.

This initiative aims to provide better purses for drivers and grow the sport as a whole. With Larson being 1 of the biggest names in the biggest motorsports and Brad Sweet’s well-known and very respected rep, it’s easy to see why they believed they could. But they’re not made of money, so they needed to use all that to attract that big money sponsor, and they did with Kubota.

While the tractor company isn’t made of money, with them being worth 14.45 billion dollars, they might as well be. And they’ve used that to give the series larger payouts and to buy out Tony Stewart’s all-star series to merge with.This is used to attract top talents like Abreu and secure an exclusive streaming contract with FloRacing, the current go-to platform for all smaller American motorsports. Putting them in the perfect position in only 3 years to take over the dirt world and to attract names like Stewart and Abreu. Thanks a bunch for reading!