“If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,” is the mantra often used by racers across different disciplines and series. Although we’ve heard a lot of stories about NASCAR drivers and their shenanigans, it looks like Chili Bowl officials are now dealing with a similar situation. The crux of the matter is tire doping, an illegal technique that is used by drivers and teams to soften the tire compound of their midget cars.

In the past few years, Chili Bowl has decided to go with a harder compound, which makes it hard for drivers to find grip on the dirt track. This is where tire doping comes in handy. And going by Tanner Thorson’s latest admission, it seems as if everyone in the Chili Bowl garage uses tire doping to get the desired results. The Chili Bowl Nationals technical director, Cody Cordell is on a mission to curb this practice and kicked out a driver from SageNet Center on Wednesday.

Tanner Thorson shares his unfiltered take on Chili Bowl’s hard stance against tire doping

Cordell and the Chili Bowl staff have been collecting tire samples from race cars and sending them to Blue Ridge Race Lab in Lenoir, North Carolina. The samples from cars competing on Monday came out clean, but samples from Thursday through Saturday night events are yet to be revealed. However, Cordell sounded alarm bells stating if anybody failed the tire tests, they would not be allowed to race next year.

There’s an air of uncertainty across the teams and drivers, but Tanner Thorson was upfront and honest about this issue. Speaking to Flo Racing, Thorson stated, “I know people, track people, everybody’s kind of sick of me bi–hing about it, but it’s what it needs to do. You got to cheat to win here, chicken sh-t basically. Everybody in here that doesn’t cheat feels the same way, and the guys that do cheat, they probably feel the same way too. Because when they get beat by guys that don’t cheat, they are kind of like, Well, they are cheating.”

“RD12 wasn’t the tire to dope up because it was already soft, and once we gone to these hard tires the track got way worse. I give them the benefit of the doubt. You saw about halfway through the shootout the track start rubbering up, getting goofy while they start popping guys for tires, and the next thing you know, the track goes slick, and the track starts being racey,” he added.

It’s not just Thorson who is frustrated with the tire doping problems. Technical Director for Chili Bowl Nationals, Cody Cordell, reportedly kicked someone out of the building after finding them carrying out this practice. He followed it up with a warning for participants at the driver’s meeting. The problem for Cordell and the competition is that detecting these chemicals takes a lot of time. Results of all the samples taken between Thursday and Saturday evening won’t be available until after the event is over, meaning the warning is as far as they can go.

However, Thorson understood the reasoning behind this undertaking and highlighted how good the racing has been. “Cody is doing an awesome job. He knows what to look for; he’s got a lot of different people, including myself, that can kind of allow him to know what I know what he needs to look for. So hats off to him and Chili Bowl and Shootout for allowing him to do that. When have you ever seen a car pulled apart, checked, and looked after dual ignition boxes or any of that stuff? So I give Cody a lot of crap, but he is doing the right thing.”

Meanwhile, Tanner Thorson brought his A-game on Thursday night in the prelim and bagged the win despite the challenge from NASCAR star Christopher Bell.

Thorson inches one step closer to his second Golden Driller

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Christopher Bell hadn’t lost a Thursday prelim night since 2015, but this streak came to an end as Tanner Thorson got the better of him at SageNet Center. Thorson started the race on the pole, whereas Bell fired off in the fourth position. After the early pile-up on Lap 4, both Thorson and Bell were involved in a thrilling battle. But Thorson made a fumble with 21 laps to go which allowed the JGR star to close the gap on him for the lead.

For some reason, Bell couldn’t capitalize as he had issues with his car’s handling. And just when it looked like Thorson would see this one out, there came a late race caution. However, this stoppage allowed him to make the necessary adjustments as he was able to hold off his rivals to grab a win.

“Yeah, man, the curb was so tough tonight, and it’s badass that it’s this way, but it took me a yellow to get tuning on my shocks. I couldn’t quite get to them under green. So, I was just kind of riding there, and honestly hoping for a yellow. Once I got tuning on the shocks a little bit, I was able to kind of plow the curb a lot harder.” Thorson said after the race.

Thanks to this win, Tanner Thorson booked his slot for the main event, whereas Christopher Bell will have to make another attempt in the Friday night feature.