The Racing Report is a five-part photo essay shot at short tracks in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania that will run in Farm and Dairy through the summer. Each month we will feature a different driver from around the region. For the second installment, photojournalist Matthew Chasney follows Brian Razum in the 305 division of the Attica-Fremont Championship series at Attica Raceway Park.
It’s a crisp, clear, late May evening in Attica, Ohio. The temperature drops to 50 F as the sun sets behind Brian Razum’s modest hauler. This is just how he likes it. The track is heavy, meaning that the last few days of rainy and cool weather have made the surface moist and grippy.
In short, this means he can run full throttle around Attica, a track he knows well. Razum, a native of Lakewood, Ohio, is in his second year as a regular in the 305 division of the Attica-Fremont Championship series and he’s hell-bent on improving on his performance from last year.
The World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series descended on Attica Raceway Park. Touring sprint car teams with multi-million dollar budgets rub elbows with racers like Bryan, 305 sprint car racer with a shoestring budget and a passion for refining his craft. Walking past the rows of massive semi-trailers operated by big name World of Outlaws teams, Razum on the phone with Nate Colson, a friend and mentor who coaches him through the finer points of entering Attica’s challenging turn 1.
There are certainly more unlikely places than Lakewood to produce a dirt sprint car racer, but not many. This walkable Cleveland suburb is known for coffee shops, record stores and yoga studios. In fact, the nearest dirt track is over an hour away. Razum, an IT specialist by trade, found himself working in the racing world by happenstance in 2010 when he helped a drag racer named Scott Palmer when his computer wasn’t working at the track.
Palmer hired him on the spot to manage the team’s tech and the two became close friends. Razum caught the sprint car bug in 2019 when the two took a trip to Eldora Speedway in New Weston, Ohio to watch the King’s Royal — perhaps the most prestigious sprint car race in the country. The lifelong racing fan and son of an autocross champion had seen a lot of racing, but nothing struck him the way that sprint cars did.
After spending a couple years racing on simulators, he decided to take the next step and do the real thing. He enrolled in the Fremont Speedway Motorsports Education program, where he learned everything from driver instruction to setup and maintenance. Every Sunday, Fremont’s program director Mike Linder would have him put in 50 laps on a slick, dusty track — difficult conditions for a professional — until he could put together 10 fast laps.
Unsurprising given Razum’s background in tech, his approach to racing is driven by data. Between heats, he scours over information that tells him where his car is performing best and compares that to the lap times of his competitors, trying to find speed in the numbers.
In year two, Razum is putting the pieces together, and he’s hitting his goal of making features consistently. That is just what he did in front of a packed house in Attica on May 24. Razum started his heat race in pole position, but slipped back going into turn 1. He was able to hold on for a respectable third-place finish, thereby making it into the 305 feature race. What worked in the heat race didn’t work in the main event. He started 13th and finished 17th — a fuel leak had methanol spraying onto his lap, making for a miserable feature.
But he didn’t let it get to him. To be successful, it helps to have reasonable expectations and, as Razum says “the memory of a goldfish.”
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