Tulsa has something truly remarkable right now in the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals and these are indeed special times for that race.

In recent years, the event has become something akin to an annual Super Bowl showdown between Christopher Bell and Kyle Larson. These are familiar names to NASCAR fans, but you haven't seen them at their absolute best until you watch them on dirt.

With all due respect to other disciplines, no other form of racing challenges the mettle of a driver quite like open-wheel dirt cars. It's the very definition of low-weight, grip-limited racing, where the driver-to-equipment ratio for success is far less dependent on engineering.

Sure, the Keith Kunz Motorsports equipment is top shelf, but you can't buy talent or results on clay, and the various results across that team this week reflect that.

So in an era where NASCAR is going the polar opposite direction with the 2019 Cup Series rules package, it has been rewarding to watch two of the best wheelmen in the sport go head-to-head for one of the biggest prizes in the discipline over the past three years.

It really makes you appreciate talents like Justin Grant, Chad Boat and Brady Bacon, who under a less financially inhibitative sporting environment, would be racing at Daytona and Indianapolis each year, based on the fact they are right with Larson and Bell each time they intermingle.

With that said, Bell and Larson are clearly generational talents, the AJ Foyts of their time.

Kunz himself has said there has never been, to his knowledge, two super-elite drivers who continually run 1-2 at every race they enter like this. And he believes their recent NASCAR experience is a large reason why.

"These two are a cut above and I think a lot of that has to do with their time in NASCAR," Kunz said. "Going 200 miles per hour. They come back here and everything slows down. We've seen that before these two, when Jason Lefler came back, they were just better.

"That's what happened to these guys. They come back here and run a lot. They run 30 sprint car and midget races a year and that's abnormal, and that makes them better. ... Kyle was heads and above for a long time, everything he got in, and Christopher over the past couple of years, Christopher has gotten better. These two are just mega-talented."

And we get to see them in their prime, in their best forms, multiple times a year.

That's a testament to Joe Gibbs and Chip Ganassi, who support their drivers' endeavours, and events like the Chili Bowl that have become a crown jewel in the dirt world and an emerging marquee event in motorsports at large.

But also give credit to Bell and Larson in the sense that they keep coming back, year after year, despite both seeming poised to become NASCAR superstars.

It's seemingly a cycle that a driver gets paid and either chooses to get complacent, joins the rank and file of those who complain about being raced too hard on Sundays, or aren't even allowed to pursue their other racing ambitions.

Bell and Larson are not only racers in the truest sense of the words, but they are also amongst the pound-for-pound best in any discipline.

And Tulsa gets to bear witness to it every January.

Not too bad for a first Chili Bowl, eh?

As a longtime observer from a far, I've always understood the appeal. I watch online and on TV each year, eagerly awaiting Saturday morning when I would brew a pot of coffee and bundle up for a long day of "alphabet soup" racing.

So, I get it.

What I didn't fully appreciate was the vibe you feel once you walk into the door for the first time. I didn't understand why hundreds of fans would buy a pit pass just to sit down on a lawn chair in front of a monitor witout ever seeing the actual Tulsa Expo Center Raceway.

I didn't fully appreciate the energy inside the race track, or what made the "rowdies" an accurate description for those devoted fans inside the general admission area.

I've written before about the appeal of midget racing in general, during a recent trip to Indiana Midget Week, and the Chili Bowl is a grander extension of that. The access to the likes of Bell, Larson, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Alex Bowman, Justin Allgaier and Conor Daly can't be obtained anywhere, and certainly not for as long a period of time.

Everyone is there for a full week and it's simply a party for grassroots racers.

There's no pretense, no security or barricades. It's just an expo for racing people to mingle with 15,000 of their closest friends.

And for a race that features a format that exudes intensity, there is very little conflict. In fact, outside of one crew member shouting at Karsyn Elledge, there wasn't anything resembling a fight or confrontation.

Even when one driver runs afoul of another, the victim will usually call the aggressor a squirrel and leave it at that, while returning to the pit.

There is so much warm joy, in the midst of a cold winter week on the Plains, that's hard to imagine not wanting to be there. I was genuinely nervous before the week because I know how passionate dirt fans are and I wanted to do right by them. I was wary that I would somehow disappoint that audience with my coverage.

Which in hindsight, was silly, because all they really care about during the Chili Bowl is making sure that you like it enough to come back. That's probably a fair way to describe the dirt community in general, welcoming and just wanting to share some of the best kept secrets in motorsports.

The Chili Bowl is more than just a race or an event.

It's a community.

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