1/11/2018
RacinBoys
Golden Driller opportunity for young Presley Truedson
RACINBOYS EXCLUSIVE By Reid Spencer (Tulsa, OK) -- At age 16, and as the youngest competitor in the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Nationals, Presley Truedson already has had to answer the question “What’s next?” at several junctures in her life.
PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Surprise/RBN
Raised in northwestern Minnesota, Truedson started racing go-karts in nearby North Dakota at age nine.
“That was just kind of a hobby with my dad, to do for fun,” Truedson said on Thursday at Tulsa Expo Raceway, less than four hours before she would run her first-ever qualifying Chili Bowl qualifying night in the No. 5T Toyota owned by Zach Daum.
“We ended up having a lot of success with it, went to the national level with that and did really well.”
Well, enough, as it turned out to win four state karting championships. From
there, Truedson looked for new worlds to conquer.
“We thought, ‘What else can we do,’ so we started racing 1000cc Lightning Sprints, and from there I ran an Eagle Motorsports Henchcraft (chassis),” she said. “That’s kind of how the deal worked out with Zach was that I was running the Henchcraft brand and he has Eagle cars.
“So we had a lot of success, and I ended up winning the national championship in the Lightning Sprints,” she said.
It was on to the next adventure, a foray into midget cars. Truedson is friends with Savanna Schatz, daughter of North Dakotan and World of Outlaws legend Donny Schatz. Daum asked the champion driver for an evaluation of Truedson’s ability, and Schatz vouched for her talent.
In her fourth event with Daum in the Lucas Oil POWRi National Midget Series, Truedson advanced to the A-main at Jacksonville (Ill.) Speedway and finished 16th against some of the best drivers in the country, including the Keith Kunz Motorsports armada.
And now it’s the Chili Bowl, with its 350-plus entrants for the girl who grew up in Kennedy, Minn., a town of 200, playing goalie for a boys’ ice hockey travel team. There were no girls’ hockey teams in Kennedy, which is almost as close to Manitoba as it is to North Dakota, but that didn’t bother Truedson.
“That’s always kind of been my mentality, I think,” she said. “It doesn’t matter who you’re playing against or racing against. At the end of the day, we all want to win. So it was kind of neat to be able to do that.”
And Truedson, who is guaranteed to roll her eyes when someone suggests she’s named for Elvis, found that hockey skills translated to the race track.
“I like the pace of it, I guess, having to have those quick reflexes,” she said. “There’s a lot of parallels between racing and hockey that I’m coming to find. It’s a lot about the mind-set and having the preparedness to do the best you can out there.”
With a 4.0 grade point average in high school, Truedson expects to be taking some online college courses in her junior year. She has a particular fondness for science and math.
“I think it’s all really cool,” she said. “A lot of that goes into racing. You can be a really good race car driver, but I feel like you can really improve on that if you know what’s going on with your car. You can then give lots more feedback and more detail and say, ‘Hey, this is what the car’s doing, this is what I feel, and what can we do to improve that?’
“And thinking out of the box really helps, because sometimes you have to be a little abstract to get the upper hand on the competition.”
On her short list of short-term goals is a national championship with Toyota and Daum. Beyond that, Truedson doesn’t know specifically what’s next.
“I really don’t know what I want to do yet,” said Truedson, who started fifth and finished fifth in her qualifying heat on Thursday. “I think that’s still up in the air. All I know is that I want to be involved in motorsports and racing, wherever it takes me, whether it’s driving or not.”
Submitted By: Kirk Elliott
