Most seasons, Bryce Allen isn’t able to make every race at Iowa’s Adams County Speedway. As a full-time soybean and corn farmer, he’s busiest in the spring when the race season is just getting started.
Thankfully for both Allen’s farming and racing, Adams County had several rainouts early in the year.
“It rained at the race track, but it didn’t rain in the field, so I was able to get my work done and not miss any races,” Allen said. “And then I kind of found myself in the hunt, I guess.”
In his 11th season at Adams County, a NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series dirt track in Corning, Iowa, Allen won nine of 16 races in the track’s B Modified division and finished in the top five 15 times. He won the track championship by 10 points and broke a track record for wins in his division.
Not only did he do well enough to win his first track title; Allen’s dominant season also led to his first NASCAR national championship. He won the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division III national championships title by 48 points ahead of Berlin Raceway’s Ryan Holtzlander.
Allen and his team built a new car for the 2024 season: “It was just really good for me,” he said.
While Allen was in the fields for work, his chassis builder took the car to the track for practice. From there, he said the car was “definitely exactly what I was looking for.”
The team suffered a setback early in June when he was disqualified from a race, but they bounced back, and Allen won the next four races in a row.
“The DQ actually probably had a positive effect,” he said. “It lit a fire underneath us and the entire team that we knew we needed to come back and win.
“I thought, ‘Well, we’re probably out of the hunt for a track title now,’ and we just kept winning races and dug ourselves back into that deal… and then midway through the summer, I knew how the national points worked and that it was different and I actually found myself climbing the ladder in national points faster than the track points.”
Much of Allen’s team is his own family. His brother helps in the shop during the week and is in the pits for each race. He’s also joined by his brother-in-law, wife and two daughters, who are 2 and 4 years old.
Allen said his family is the reason he stuck with racing this year.
“My life and job are pretty busy, but they love to go,” Allen said. “And it gives us a chance to go as a family. My mom loves it, too. It’s something we do on Saturday nights that keeps us all together.”
Allen’s daughters even got used to celebrating his many wins this season.
“I don’t think they quite understand, but it got to be a deal later in the season that on Saturday mornings we always say, ‘OK, it’s race day. Dad’s got to go to work for a while and then I’ll see you tonight.’ And it turned into, ‘We’ll see you in Victory Lane, Dad.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, don’t get used to it because it doesn’t always work like this.’
“It’s very special. There was a lot of those wins that one of the officials would hand the trophy to one of my girls to give to me in Victory Lane. That’s pretty special. You don’t get those moments back.”
Allen hasn’t decided if he’ll race again next season. Last October, he still hadn’t decided if he’d be racing in 2024.
“It’s a stressful sport. Points racing, especially,” he said. “You ask a guy at the end of the year, a lot of them say they’re never racing again or they’re done racing, and then it gets to be about January, and it’s like, ‘Well, I suppose we can start working on the car again.’
“I still have the car, and I haven’t really made up my mind yet.”
Whatever he plans to do in 2025, Allen can forever call himself a track and national champion, which makes his decision for his future of racing even tougher.
“It feels pretty special, and I think that that’s kind of the other battle of trying to decide if I’m done or not,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to have had a year like that. I mean, that might be a once in a lifetime thing, and maybe you quit while you’re ahead. I don’t know. It’s definitely very special.
“I’ve just got to thank my family and all my sponsors and everybody that’s done this since 2013 with me. It’s been fun.”