With all of the young drivers joining the Midwest sprint-car scene this year, including some with high-profile teams and impressive resumes, Robert Ballou was the most unexpected success.
Coming out of Northern California’s winged-sprint-car ranks, and running a handful of non-winged events in 2006, he jumped right in to the deep end. Although it took awhile to find his stroke, he has achieved remarkable success.
As of this writing, Ballou has scored eight consecutive feature wins, among them the last three races of the ASCS Sprint Bandit Tourin’ Topless Midwest Tour, including the $10,000-to-win finale at Kansas’ Lakeside Speedway, and the USAC sprint car feature anchoring Eldora’s 4-Crown Nationals. A victory at Eldora in April brings his total to nine. This comes after a winter during which the 18-year old wondered if his racing career was over before it really got going. 
In 2006, Ballou was competing in the King of California series, trying to cut his racing teeth against some of the West Coast’s top winged-sprint car racers. He developed a bad reputation and was known as a fighter. Some of the veterans made it unbearable. 
“They forgot what learning how to drive a sprint car is like,” Ballou says. “If you accidentally make a mistake and run into them, they’d always come back and blame it on you, and scream at you after the races. A few times it kind of got me and it shouldn’t have, but it was to the point where they weren’t letting it go, even when I ran them cleanly.”
In the aftermath, several forces came into play for Ballou during last winter. A downturn in the economy that affected the family construction business led to the realization that he would have to find funding elsewhere for the coming season. When Dallas Mulvaney contacted him about running with USAC in 2007, Ballou knew that it was an opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper. 
Ballou had met Mulvaney while at the Knoxville Nationals, where both were in the midst of difficult weeks. This led to an opportunity to race Mulvaney’s MPHG Promotions sprinter in a handful of races, which included a victory in the opening race of last summer’s Sprint Bandit Midwest TnT Tour. 
For the ’07 season, Ballou brought a couple of cars, motors, his truck and trailer, and Mulvaney bankrolled the rest. The budget was for the USAC National Sprint Car Series, and didn’t include any local racing. This meant Ballou would have to be a quick learner.
“I think we went to those tracks being there once or twice, if at all,” he explained about his Indiana Sprint Week experience. “Some of these guys have 10 or 20 years on these race tracks, and I have to learn to be faster than them just in one five-lap hot lap session, which is kind of tough.”
He knew that the short tracks were going to be a struggle. Even though he ran fourth at Lawrenceburg, he was never comfortable.
“I couldn’t get over the fact that I couldn’t keep the car straight. I always felt like it was going to spin out. I knew that it wouldn’t, but it just didn’t feel right. It took me quite a while to overcome that,” Ballou said. “And the dry-slick is another thing that I knew I was going to struggle with.”
Then he adds, “Every night I go out and learn something, or I have to overcome something that I haven’t had to deal with before. There’s always new things at different tracks. In one corner of the track it’s dry-slick and one corner it’s hooked up; we encountered that at Lakeside on one of the nights.”
Working in Ballou’s favor is crew chief Jimmy Jones. Jones gained his experience working under the tutelage of Karl Kinser. Ballou may have had the best setup for both Eldora races, the result of Jones’ ability to apply what he learned with the winged sprinters. 
“With a winged car you keep the car straight and learn how to keep the momentum because that’s the only way you’re going to be really fast,” Ballou explained. “At Eldora, whoever can drive the car the straightest is going to be faster. That’s why I think me and Ricky Stenhouse and a couple others who run a winged car every once in a while were able to go out and be fast.”
Lately, Ballou’s been able to race more. The reason is simple he says, “If we go out and win some races, that’s our extra spending money to go racing at local shows. When we win, they do let me go run a little bit more.”