Stormy Scott and crew chief Jason Durham have been MIA from Dirt Late Model competition the last four months, their last race together of the 2023 season being the World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.

But through all that time, they’ve been up to something special and seclusive ahead of this week’s grand unveiling at the Rio Grande Waste Systems Wild West Shootout presented by O’Reilly Auto Parts at Vado Speedway Park. 

With Scott’s podium finish Saturday alongside the unassailable Bobby Pierce and Longhorn Factory Team driver Brandon Sheppard came the official announcement, more or less, of his newest venture: Catagory 5 Race Cars.

Yes, the Las Cruces, N.M., driver and Durham are the braintrust of the sport’s newest chassis manufacturer, and the backstory of how it all formulated is fascinating.

“It’s been a lot of work, but we’re enjoying it,” Durham said. “We’re having fun. So far, so good.”

The idea of launching their own Dirt Late Model chassis brand didn’t enter Scott’s and Durham’s mind until World 100 weekend last September, when an informal meeting with Bruce Nunnally of Brucebilt Performance put the undertaking in motion.

Scott initially met with Nunnally, a renowned Dirt Late Model fabricator and chassis builder, to discuss the possibility of building a modified chassis.

“We talked about modifieds for like two seconds and all of a sudden a Late Model came up,” Scott said. “We just started talking about it. And one thing led to another. Bruce said to let him know if we wanted to do this (start a new chassis brand).”

Scott and Durham are a driver-crew chief combo that make decisions together as if they’re a couple that are happily married. When Durham left Jonathan Davenport’s Double L Motorsports team at the end of the Blairsville, Ga., driver’s incredible $2 million season in 2022, he didn’t have spearheading a new chassis brand on his radar.

“No, I said wouldn’t build them,” Durham said. “I wasn’t going to mess with the chassis side.”

So what’s the catch? Durham’s role in the operation of Catagory 5 Race Cars — the catchy name branded around Scott’s first name Stormy — is to simply build the race car’s components. The assembling of those components, meanwhile, is in Nunnally’s hands — hands too good for Durham to turn away. All of Nunnally’s chassis building will be at his Knoxville, Tenn., fabrication shop.

“He’s one of, if not, the best Dirt Late Model fabricator you’ll ever meet,” Durham said. “You surround yourself with good people, and usually you’ll have good results. We’ve been trying to do that. I’ve been smart about it as we went. So far, it’s been a good deal.”

Scott’s first-ever Catagory 5 Race Car that went wheel-to-wheel with the likes of Pierce and Sheppard at Vado is another compelling backstory. When observing Scott’s race machine this week at Vado, whether in person or through a phone screen, it’s noticeable how low his roof sits compared to the average Dirt Late Model.

That’s because the chassis is from 2013, a car that’d been acquired from Rick Eckert and a car that’d virtually been forgotten about in the York, Pa., racer’s shop the last decade. The car had also never been used before, not once, and had been built by Nunnally, who retrieved the car from Eckert over the winter.

Eckert, from what Durham shared, intended to race the car in 2014, but that year he filled in for the injured Josh Richards aboard the Rocket Chassis house car. And Eckert’s loyally campaigned Rocket race cars ever since.

Durham wouldn’t explicitly provide many details about the chassis other than it had been restructured to keep up with the sport’s ever-evolving nature and that Nunnally built the car.

“Let me put it this way: Bruce Nunnally built this car 13 years ago, the same guy building these cars now,” Durham said. “He originally built this car. He built everything himself. If you connect the dots enough, you’ll figure it out. If you figure out where he was 10 years ago, then you’d figure it out.”

Connecting those dots reveals Nunnally as a former longtime worker for Scott Bloomquist of Team Zero, a position he held from 2003-14. Nunnally nowadays is involved also with Cory Hedgecock’s BMF Race Cars.

On Saturday, Scott said, “I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve been this comfortable,” which is quite the testament considering the first-ever chassis is essentially the half-baked concept of what Catagory 5 Race Cars will ultimately become.

“Usually, like even in the heats, I don’t like running the cushion,” Scott said. “I’m not comfortable running up there. But in this thing, I feel like I can run anywhere on the racetrack. I’m just comfortable in it. Jason says that’s more than half the battle. If you can get comfortable, the rest will come.

“There are some things we would’ve liked to change on it, but we just ran out of time, plain and simple,” he continued. “Four months sounds like a lot. Then you dig into this deal and you realize it ain’t nothing, especially with the holidays. So far, so good. We’re really happy with what we’ve done here.”

As far as the restructuring of the 2013 Nunnally-built chassis goes, Durham said mostly every major component has been modernized, including the right-front construction, window bars, the fuel mounts, engine mounts and rear-end.

“Like, we’ve restructured the whole thing, minus the cage,” Durham said. “We weren’t going to cut the cage apart. We are going to go back and change that, raise the roof on it a little bit. For Stormy and them, they spend more time with their grandparents, this two weeks, than they do the whole year. We wanted to get it together just so they come out here.”

It’d be remiss to not mention Durham bringing closure to Scott’s team no longer running Longhorns.

“They were good cars. I have nothing against those guys,” Durham said. “I have a good relationship with them.”

The hope for Catagory 5 Race Cars isn’t to evolve into the sport’s next big thing and rival the reaches of Longhorn and Rocket Chassis. The immediate goal is simple: Establish a balance get up to speed.

“Our goal is to get them running to be competitive with all the other cars and brands,” Durham said. “I won’t say we won’t sell them. We’ll probably sell a few eventually once we get comfortable. We feel like they’re good pieces. We’ll probably sell a few of them eventually.

“The other goal is balance. You have to get everything balanced. We’ve spend a lot of time on parts and pieces that we decided to put on there that a lot of them people don’t run. We’ve done a lot of new stuff on our own. So, at the shop, you get it to where you feel like you have a baseline. Then we went and tested (at Route 66 Motor Speedway in Amarillo, Texas).

“We tweaked on the shocks, rods, and all kinds of little pieces to where we get a comfortable balance. We worked on our shocks and stuff to get that more comfortable to him. It’s just a step and time. When you get a balance, you have a baseline. We’re going to do a lot of testing this coming year. We’re liable to test just as much as we race just to try and perfect this new program.”

And testing just as much as racing isn’t burdensome nor boring for Durham. As much as he excelled traveling up and down the road with Davenport through the 2022 season, he’s fitting right in with the Scotts.

“We’re like family since I took the job,” Durham said. “And we didn’t have a bad year last year for being a new year. We made the World 100. We made the Dream. We won two $10,000 races last year. But this is just another chapter that he wanted to do. … and if I was going to do it, now is the time to do it. As I said, the next car we race after Vado will be a 100 percent, brand-new everything.”

On that same note, Scott is anticipating the 2.0 version of the Catagory 5 Race Car to perform even more to his liking.

“The next one, I hope it’s better,” Scott said. “It’ll be a little different, like the cage and stuff will be a little higher. Mainly we’ve done everything we’ve wanted to do, corner-wise, except for raising the cage and stuff. But yeah, (the one we have now is) a very old car.”

Scott’s fiancee, Ashley Conner, is the one to thank for the very on-brand chassis name centered around the New Mexico driver’s first name.

“She thought it’d be good for marketing with shirts,” Scott said. “And you can do different stuff with the name.”

After the Wild West Shootout, the tandem of Scott and Durham probably won’t race again until March. They’ll spend the next two months building at least two more Catagory 5 Race Cars so they can bolster the arsenal and break in those new race machines with test sessions potentially at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway and I-75 Speedway in Niota, Tenn., two racetracks Scott knows well.

“It’s fun racing, but when you get to be part of something like we are with this car, it’s amazing how much better it feels,” Scott said. “We see the potential in what it can become. We feel like we can keep making this thing better and better. And the more comfortable I get it, we’ll be better, too. We’re definitely extremely excited about this.”