CALHAN, Colo. (Dec. 6, 2024) – Bryan Moore dedicated his first championship winning season to his dad.
This year, everything was for mom.
Moore raced to 17 Mach-1 Sport Compact feature wins this season, then walked across the stage during the IMCA national banquet to accept congratulations and awards for Honor Speedway and Phillips County Raceway track, BST South Series and Colorado State championships.
“It felt great, to be honest. We were just going to race at our home track, but I looked at schedules for some of the other tracks and figured we could make a run at the state championship. That’s kind of how this season happened. I was just able to make it work,” he said. “If I had to put everything about the banquet into a single word, it was an honor.”
“We dedicated countless hours working on the car and trying to get that little bit of an edge,” he continued. “To be recognized at a banquet of that magnitude, there’s no greater honor. You see how all the work pays off.”
Moore lives 10 minutes or so from El Paso County Raceway and didn’t realize there was a track in Calhan before driving by it on a busy race night.
He was in the stands the following weekend and on the track in a car of his own a couple months later.
Runner-up in state point standings in 2014, Moore made his first trip Lincoln and the IMCA banquet after winning Calhan track and state titles the following season.
His father Tony Sr., always an important part of Moore’s racing endeavors, died in April of 2020. He raced “off and on, catching a few races here and there without a lot of success” before finding a new drive to win with the declining health diagnosis his mother Sherri received this spring.
“I started the season running like we did every other year. This is the first full season we’ve dedicated to racing since my father passed away,” he explained. “I tried to go back sooner but just couldn’t get my head into it – racing is something he and I started together, and I couldn’t get back into the rhythm of things with him gone.”
“Sport Compacts are more of a family than we are competitors,” emphasized Moore, 13th in the national points race. “There’s a group of us at Honor and we’ve been traveling together. We are competitors but it’s with a family feel.”
Largely a one-man team during the season, he traveled with wife Shawnee Reed and daughter Leah, 4, who learned that while her dad wins a lot, he can’t win them all this season. His mother and son Leland, 14, joined them for the 568-mile trip to Lincoln.
Leland will start his Sport Compact career in 2025, and Moore moves up to the IMCA Sunoco Hobby Stock division, driving a car he built with Trevor Bartosik of Warrior Welding.
“I’ve been racing a Sport Compact for a lot of years. After we came to the banquet in 2015, my father and I had discussed moving into a rear-wheel-drive car, but I never really thought about it much after that,” Moore said. “The reason why I’ve decided I’m going to do it is because my father and I always worked on V8 cars and trucks. I feel like it’s a way to renew a connection with him and honor his memory.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.