500 Sprint Car Tour Media sat down with Kenyon Midget Series Owner Brad Hayes. Hayes and wife Nan are entering their fourth year of ownership of the series. He talks about the challenges he has faced and goals for the future.

What has been your biggest challenge owning the Kenyon Midget Series?

Right now it is scheduling races. But since the beginning the biggest struggle is getting enough people interested in the series to get our car counts up. Trying to get a steady group of drivers that want to run full-time or that want to run most of the races. It has been slowly creeping up year over year and I think this year will be a pretty decent positive step.

What hair products do you use?

Hahaha, I use whatever generic shampoo that is cheap at the store and a hat. For the three days a year that I don't wear a hat I use American Crew Fiber Hair Gel.

We searched high and low to find a picture of Brad Hayes without a hat on. - Jack Kessler Photo

As you enter your fourth year of ownership of the series, what are your goals for the next couple years?

My biggest goal is to try to solidify the pipeline of drivers. I want to continue to strengthen the pipeline to Kenyon Midgets from karting and then from kenyon midget series to the 500 Sprint Car Tour. We have had quite a few drivers move up over the past few years, but I just wanna keep that going. That just helps us as a true sort of feeder into the higher ranks.

What has been the biggest reward of owning the Kenyon Midget Series?

The biggest reward is seeing drivers progress throughout the season and from season to season is the coolest thing. Before the Kenyon midget series I was working with one or maybe two drivers over the course of the season. Now we see 10, 15, 20 different drivers from race 1 to the final race of the season. You always see huge improvements and when they come back for a second year, you see another step of improvements. That has been the coolest thing to see.

Do you have a memorable race from the past three seasons?

The one that always sticks out in my head was the Thomas Schrage run at Anderson a couple years ago. He had an incident in the heat race, started at the tail of the feature and he drove up through the field and won the feature. That was probably the most impressive performance.

How do you balance owning the series, cars within the series and other racecars?

Yeah the balance within the series itself, I think, is working out pretty well. We are just super open and transparent between our team's midgets and the rest of the people in the series. That, I think, has worked out fairly well. Everybody knows that we are an open book and were not trying to do anything special to our cars to beat up on the rest of the competition. That has been a fairly good balance, it took a couple of years for people to completely understand that. I think we are there.

The sprint car stuff that happens day to day at the shop, I spend a fair amount of time on personally. When it comes to a race weekend that is usually Tony (Fox) and Dustin (Fox) and other guys on the crew handle the race cars. I especially rely on them when we have joint races between the Kenyon Series and 500 Sprint Car Tour. I've got enough good people to take care of the cars and all of that, so I can focus on the series.

Brad Hayes (Left) and Jackson Macenko (Right) sit at the Little 500 drivers meeting. Jack Kessler Photo

What is Nan’s (Brad’s Wife) secret to her delicious Chocolate Chip Cookies?

It’s a secret….. (Sorry we tried, he wasn't willing to give up the secret)

What have you learned from building the first new Kenyon Midget in the several years?

We have learned that a lot of the parts that were being used aren't necessarily readily available anymore. That is the biggest thing so we are working to source new parts and find suppliers that can supply a lot of pieces that we need to build a complete car.

We have now created a full bill of materials of what it takes to put a car together down to the nuts and bolts. Every single line item now has a supplier for it and how much it is going to cost. That has been a huge learning aspect of building the first new car in years. That is part of the reason why I wanted to get ahead and pull the trigger on getting one built. That way when a customer comes up and says they wanna a new car i can actually answer that question of What is it gonna cost and how much time is it gonna take.

8 Questions with Brad Hayes

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