CORONA, California (December 5, 2013) – Ritchie Lewis compares officiating an auto race to calling balls and strikes in a baseball game, and when he looks back on his first season as director of the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series presented by GEICO he believes he and his crew of umpires did a job worthy of a pennant-winning team.

Lewis was named series director a year ago, during a period of uncertainty. Now, with his management system established and long-term television contracts in place, he can stand on a solid foundation and plan for the future of the world’s best short course off road racing series.

“I think it’s come a long way,” said Lewis, a self-described “country bumpkin” from Waycross, Georgia, who also is director of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series. “We got a lot of wins this year and we were able to make a lot of improvements.

“This time last year it was a little unsettled about what we were going to be able to do. (Now) We don’t have to change everything at once. We can slowly and methodically do the things that we know will help this form of racing so much more than it’s ever been able to be helped in the past.

“This thing doesn’t need to be chopped up. It just needs to be reeled in. It needs to have some slow, methodical, communicated changes. It grew so fast, so quick, that the infrastructure did not keep up with it. I feel like it’s my job to go back and realign the infrastructure.”

Before Lewis could start that job, however, he had to go through the usual introductory process. He is of the opinion that while each form of the sport may have its unique challenges most of the basic rules and methods of enforcing them can be applied across the board because “it’s still racing at the end of the day.” All he had to do was prove that to the racers and some of the officials who wondered if the new kid on the block was all bluster or able to pass muster.

“There was a lot of that, because you have to earn people’s respect,” he said, and in some ways the racers were easier to deal with than the officials who “had only done it the way they had done it and had never been to a Late Model race to see what worked and what didn’t.” On the other hand “the real race teams, the guys that are truly professional, automatically understand if you know what you’re talking about or not by the first words that roll off your tongue. Fortunately … they did give me a chance to prove myself. That actually enabled me to find success, and to find it early on, and for that I’m extremely grateful.”

In a sense, Lewis talked his way into being successful.

“It always comes back to communication. That’s normally the key to everything,” he said. “You can never over-communicate. It gets a little tiresome when you’ve told the same story 10 times, but if it takes 12 times to get it through and get it to happen and you get a win at the end of the day, then it’s worth those other two or three times. The one guy or girl that doesn’t understand what your expectations are can mess it up for everybody else. That’s why we communicate, communicate, communicate.”

There are two important elements to communication as well – honesty and consistency.

“All they want is that you just be fair and consistent,” Lewis said of the racers. “They’ll work with most any rule you give them as long as they know what the call is going to be. If you tell them something at the driver’s meeting you better damn well back it up. As long as you do what you say you’re going to do they’ll respect you at the end of the day. When you do it one way one week and another way the next week, they wonder who you’re actually trying to help.

“We all have to officiate with integrity and decency and respect for the guy that pulls in with a little open trailer as well as the guy that pulls in with 50 crew members and catering and all the bells and whistles. It still has to be the same.”

That’s where the “balls and strikes” concept becomes important. One thing Lewis instituted was the use of numbers rather than names to identify the drivers on the track because “your mind will see exactly what happened if you keep it to play by play versuis what your mind will see if you allow it to become personal.” And when something does happen that requires an official decision Lewis wants it to be made quickly and decisively. Balls and strikes.

“Are we going to make mistakes? Most certainly,” he said. “But are we going to weather the storm and be there for the long haul? Yes, we are.”

There were some disappointments, too, Lewis said. One was that “it’s taken us longer to get one of the classes (Pro Lite) reeled in than we would have liked for it to have taken.” The other was that there continued to be issues with the procedures and behavior of some team’s spotters, a problem Lewis said will be addressed for the 2014 season.

The problems with the Pro Lite class grew out of the decision to move the Limited Buggy and Super Lite classes to the Regional series and streamline the weekend schedule at national events. In response many of the drivers joined the Pro Lite class and that resulted in drivers of various skill levels competing in fields too large to be adequately officiated.

“It’s just so hard to officiate 25 or 30 vehicles on the track,” Lewis said, “because when you turn your head toward Turn 1 you cannot see Turns 2, 4 or 6, but those teams that are in 2, 4 or 6 still expect you to be looking at their car and making the call on that.”

The solution was to limit the Pro Lite grid to 20 trucks through a combination of timed qualifying (the fastest nine in each of two sessions) and the Last Chance Qualifier race (with the top two finishers advancing) and still try to give those not making the main event as much exposure as possible at the track and on television.

That restructuring wasn’t popular with everyone, but Lewis said it was necessary. He said there will be more tweaks next season as well, but he’ll be able to make those decisions with a strong support group in place.

“I really want to thank all the officials,” Lewis said. “They could have said that ‘we’re not gonna help this old country bumpkin do his thing,’ but they bought in. They’re now saying we and us instead of I, and instead of ‘we used to do it this way’ it’s ‘how are we going to do it now as a group and an organization.’

“I’m very, very proud of them.”

The Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series presented by GEICO is supported by a potent marketing concept known as “Team Lucas” whose members include Lucas Oil Products Inc., E3 Spark Plugs, General Tire, GEICO, Canidae All Natural Pet Food, MAVTV-American Real, Speedco Truck Lube and Tire, Optima Batteries, Toyota, iON Cameras, LoanMart and Protect The Harvest.

Additional sponsorship is provided by Rockstar Energy, 4 Wheel Parts, Lunarpages, ReadyLIFT,