Tallan Chandler balancing activities with winning at Hawkeye Downs

Tallan Chandler’s schedule is loaded.

Still, he’s made plenty of time for winning this summer.

Chandler, 14, is the points leader in Hawkeye Downs’ Sports Mods division.

“It feels good,” Chandler said. “I like just knowing that what we’ve worked for all year is paying off.”

Friday, Chandler finished second in a six-car Sports Mods lineup. Now, with one race remaining in the NASCAR Advance Auto Part Weekly Racing Series, Chandler is up four points on second-place driver Chad Siems.

“He’s had a pretty good season—he’s had one of the fastest cars all year,” Chandler’s father, Nate Chandler said. “Sometimes he gets into positions being overly cautious and kind of gets caught up in some damage, but if he can get out front, he’s got a good car and he’s a very good driver.”

Tallan Chandler has won three (Sports Mods) features and has finished top five in 10 of 12 Sports Mods races in 2024.

Among his top highlights from this season was a double feature win on June 7.

“He raced on the half mile in an (HD) Dawg division and won the feature,” Nate Chandler said. “Then he won the Sport Mods feature in the same car the same night.”

This is Tallan Chandler’s third year racing at HD. He spent the 2022 season racing Hornets at age 12 before switching to Sports Mods in 2023.

Racing is just one of the activities that keeps Tallan Chandler busy. He also plays travel baseball for the Eastern Iowa Thunder and has started high school football practice. He will be a freshman at Cedar Rapids Jefferson this year.

“He’s very, very active,” Nate Chandler said. “Between travel baseball, high school baseball and football, he usually has something every single day.”

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Friday night racing is often just the beginning of a full weekend of competition for the Chandlers.

“Most of the times after Friday nights, we’re leaving at 5, 6 in the morning Saturday to go out of town for baseball, so there’s not a whole lot of rest after racing,” Nate Chandler said. “A lot of the travel is to Des Moines.”

The action-packed schedule hasn’t distracted Tallan Chandler from what he has an opportunity to do next Friday — win a track championship. A top-five finish in the feature would assure him a share of the Sports Mods title, andresearch suggests that would make him the youngest track champion in Hawkeye Downs history.

He’s not looking ahead — he’s keeping things in perspective.

“I just want to finish the year strong,” Tallan Chandler said. “Just have fun.”

“I’m just really happy with how he’s progressed,” Nate Chandler said. “He’s very good at what he does. He earned every bit of it and he deserves to have something to show for it at the end.

“I think a lot of his friends look up to him because most of them don’t even have their school permits yet, and he’s out here racing a full-sized car against adults. So, he definitely enjoys it.”