Interview with 2024 SportMod Champion Cole Wayman

By Greg Soukup

I’m sure that, like me, we are all ready for racing season to start. It’s been 5 months since the Stewart Alley Memorial closed out the 2024 racing season at Eagle Raceway, it’s been nearly a month since the annual Eagle Raceway banquet and it’s still over 2 months until the Icebreaker Challenge gives us our first taste of racing action in the 2025 season. As I write this the temperature is a chilly 35 degrees. We had freezing drizzle all day this past Tuesday. The weather guessers are predicting snow Monday through Wednesday with temperatures in the mid-teens. I need some racing in my life and soon, and I bet you do too.

So; I will be interviewing last year’s points champions over the next few weeks to get their thoughts on their accomplishments and find out what their plans are for this coming season.

First off, I spoke to Cole Wayman who took home the points win in the Avid Realty IMCA Sportmod class. Actually, Cole came within 9 points of grabbing 2 crowns after finishing just behind Jason Danley in the Nebraska Septic IMCA Racesaver Sprint Car battle. Interestingly enough, he finished exactly 9 counters ahead of last year’s Sportmod points champion Adam Vrbka.

I asked him about what a strain that put on him and his crew and he replied “It’s not terrible. The hardest part about running 2 classes is just the amount of time during the week between the shop and the track. As far as driving 2 different cars, they take 2 completely different driving styles between the sprint car and the sportmod”.

I inquired about coming so close to also winning the sprint car points, to which he stated “We came super close, especially the last night of the season. We led the points most of the year but kind of fell off a little bit, but then we caught on to something that was working for us. We were just a little too far behind by then. We made some good runs as the season went on.”

Cole took after his father Dan who raced A Modifieds at Eagle until 2010 when he began competing there in a 360 Sprint Car. Dan broke his foot that year kicking off Cole’s racing career in go-karts in 2010. He moved up to restricted micro-sprints in 2015. The following year he and his father drove weekly down to Grain Valley, Missouri so that Cole could compete in an E-Mod because he was just 13, not old enough to compete with the IMCA. He managed to bring home the championship there in his first season competing in a full-sized car. Then in 2017 he began running an IMCA Sportmod, added a stock car to his stable in 2018 but quit running the stock car in 2019. In 2020 he grabbed the Sportmod points at Eagle Raceway and also competed in a limited Late Model, moving up to a Crate Late Model in 2021. 2022 he ran the Super Late Model class as well as an A Modified. His first year in Racesaver Sprint came in 2023, competing in that class as well as the A Modifieds. This past season he dropped back to the Sportmod Class but continued competing with the Racesaver Sprints.

Cole’s plans for 2025 are to continue in both the IMCA Sportmod and the Racesaver Sprint Car. Cole related “I love to race, so if something else comes up and I can make it happen, I definitely will not say no. 2024 was a good season for us with three wins in the Racesaver Sprint. We did have one Did Not Qualify (DNF) in the Sportmod, but other than that I believe our worst finish in that class was a 10th place result, coming in the Icebreaker Challenge. We had a lot of consistency at Eagle, and we look forward to being back there every Saturday this year.”