The Long Way Back to the Infield

Sometimes you can point to one seemingly ordinary moment and realize, years later, that it quietly changed the direction of your life.

For me, one of those moments happened sometime around 1998, when my good friend Tracy Jones talked me into going to Mt. Vernon, Illinois, to watch Donnie Tudor race.

Tracy was part of Tudor’s crew, and because I was with Tracy, I somehow just became part of the whole thing too. They never made me feel like an outsider. I was in the pits with them, around the car, around the crew, right in the middle of everything.

Honestly, I didn’t really know there was any other way to watch a dirt race.

I thought that was just how you did it.

So I went back the next Saturday.

And the Saturday after that.

And pretty much every Saturday for the rest of the racing season.

A lot of Sundays too.

Before I knew it, dirt racing had worked its way into me.

The View I Wanted

That year, we raced against Terry English from time to time, especially on the Sundays when we would travel to Calvert City, Paducah, Clarksville and a handful of other tracks.

I loved all of it.

The pits. The noise. The dirt. The trailers. The crews scrambling between races. The cars firing up. The smell of race fuel. The organized chaos that somehow made perfect sense once you were in the middle of it.

But almost immediately, there was somewhere else I wanted to be.

The infield.

With a camera.

I could already see the photographs in my head.

The problem was that this was 1998.

We were still shooting film. Good photography equipment was expensive, and taking hundreds or thousands of photographs at a race wasn’t nearly as simple as filling up a memory card.

You bought film. You shot it. You paid to have it developed. Then you crossed your fingers and hoped you actually got the photograph you thought you got.

At that point in my life, I definitely didn’t have the money to invest in the gear it would have taken to chase that idea seriously.

So it stayed an idea.

Then Life Changed

After the 1998 racing season, I moved to Kansas City.

In 2001, Dale Earnhardt died.

Tudor quit racing.

And somewhere along the way, I started thinking that maybe that chapter of my life had simply ended.

No more Saturday nights at the dirt track.

No more standing in the pits.

No camera in the infield.

Life moved on.

For a long time, I did too.

Then Came Clarksville

Fast forward to 2017.

Paul took me to the Toilet Bowl at Clarksville Speedway.

And there it was again.

That feeling.

The smell. The noise. The dirt. The cars.

That part of me that had apparently never really gone anywhere woke right back up.

Paul would end up being part of several important turns in this story. He was the one who first took me to Riverside International Speedway in West Memphis, and Riverside was where I really fell in love with dirt racing all over again.

Not exactly the way I had loved it in 1998.

This time it was mine.

And this time, I had a camera.

Seitz Media Group Goes Racing

Eventually I made a decision.

Seitz Media Group was going to chase motorsports.

Not someday.

Not when everything was perfect.

Not when I had some magical sign that I was ready.

I was going to do the thing I had wanted to do when I was standing in those pits back in 1998.

And into the infield I went.

That first time stepping inside the fence with a camera probably didn’t look particularly significant to anyone watching.

To me, it was years overdue.

And it was exactly where I had wanted to be.

What I didn’t fully understand until I was actually out there was just how different racing feels from the infield.

Those cars are close.

When a dirt late model comes flying past you at speed, you don’t just hear it. You feel it.

The sound hits your chest. The ground vibrates beneath you. The air moves. Dirt hangs around you. And for a split second, it feels like the car passes straight through your heartbeat.

It is pure adrenaline.

And somehow, while all of that is happening, I’m looking through a viewfinder trying to catch one tiny fraction of a second before it disappears.

That feeling is a huge part of why I love photographing motorsports.

There is nothing quite like standing that close to it, feeling all that power come past you, and knowing you have one instant to get the shot.

The World Kept Opening Up

The more I photographed racing, the more that world started opening back up.

Paul and I went to the Dirt Nationals in December 2025.

Then in March 2026, we found ourselves back at the Toilet Bowl in Clarksville again.

The same event that had helped reconnect me with dirt racing nine years earlier.

Only by then, everything was different.

Because I wasn’t just someone who loved going to races anymore.

I was building something around them.

A month later, in April 2026, I photographed motocross in St. Louis for the first time.

Honestly, the only reason I agreed to do it was because Paul’s son Ande had raced motocross through much of his childhood and into his teens.

It wasn’t a world I really knew, but I wanted to understand a little of the world they had shared.

So I showed up with my camera, stood beside a completely different kind of track, and tried to see it through my own lens.

Different machines. Different dirt. Different kind of racing.

But that same feeling was there.

Speed. Timing. Motion. Adrenaline.

And a camera in my hands.

Then Things Got Bigger

Since making the decision that Seitz Media Group was going after motorsports, that camera has taken me to Paducah International Raceway, Riverside International Speedway, Whynot Motorsports Park, Magnolia Motor Speedway and more.

And then last weekend it took me somewhere the girl standing in the pits at Mt. Vernon in 1998 never would have imagined.

Eldora Speedway.

The World 100.

The granddaddy of them all.

Standing inside Eldora with my camera, photographing the World 100, was one of those moments where you almost have to stop and ask yourself:

How in the hell did I get here?

And when I trace it backward, the answer starts with Tracy convincing me to go watch Donnie Tudor race one Saturday night nearly three decades ago.

One Saturday night.

One dirt track.

One invitation.

Then Paul loving the track as much as I do and taking me with him.

And somehow, all these years later, I was standing inside Eldora with a camera in my hands.

Life is strange that way.

Twenty-Eight Years Later

Then came Paducah.

And Tanner English.

Terry English’s son.

That one stopped me for a second.

Because suddenly there was this strange, beautiful straight line connecting 1998 to 2026.

Back then, I was standing in the pits with Donnie Tudor’s crew, watching Terry English race from time to time and wishing I could somehow get myself inside that fence with a camera.

Twenty-eight years later, Terry’s son came through my viewfinder.

The first photograph with this story is Donnie Tudor.

The second is Tanner English.

Different generations.

Different race cars.

Different tracks.

Different versions of me.

But those two photographs belong together.

One represents where this part of my story began.

The other reminds me just how far that story has traveled.

Sometimes It Just Takes the Long Way Around

For a long time, I thought I had missed my chance.

I thought moving away, life changing and racing disappearing from my world meant that whatever I had imagined in 1998 was simply one of those things that wasn’t going to happen.

Turns out, it just hadn’t happened yet.

I had to leave.

I had to come back.

I needed people along the way who opened doors, invited me along or simply said, let’s go to the races.

Tracy was there at the beginning.

Paul helped bring racing back into my life years later and has been beside me for a lot of what came after.

But eventually, I had to pick up the camera.

I had to decide Seitz Media Group was going racing.

And I had to walk through that gate and into the infield myself.

Sometimes life doesn’t bring you back to exactly where you started.

Sometimes it brings you back carrying the thing you wished you had the first time.

And I have a feeling the version of me standing in those pits in 1998 would be pretty damn happy to know where that camera eventually took us.

From Mt. Vernon to Clarksville. From Riverside to Paducah. From Mississippi to Eldora. From standing in the pits wishing I could do it to standing in the infield actually doing it.

It took almost 28 years.

But I finally got there.