Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Knowles regaining his health, his speed
It was just a local 604 Crate Late Model show at Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala., the type of affair that’s especially unspectacular for a driver whose career accomplishments rise to the lofty heights of winning a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event. But last Saturday’s race was as far from run-of-the-mill as possible for Jake Knowles.
A veteran 40-year-old racer from Rome, Ga., whose father, Wade, is a former standout Dirt Late Model driver and member of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, Knowles savored his visit to Dega like he was competing in a crown jewel. He had a good reason.
“I didn’t know if I’d ever run another race,” Knowles said, “so just being out there meant a lot.”
The appearance marked his first action since last August after his 2025 season was short-circuited by a serious medical issue that had threatened his life. Knowles was hospitalized for a month-and-a-half last fall, spending much of the time incoherent while attached to life-support equipment that allowed his body to heal.
The ordeal began for Knowles last September as he was preparing to run the Crate Late Model portion of the Alabama State Championships at East Alabama Motor Speedway in Phenix City, a race he considers one of his favorites of the year. He woke up early Sept. 18 feeling “so bad” and quickly realized he couldn’t brush it off. He called his mother, Cindy, and let her know he was ailing.
“I’m not a guy who’s been sick or gone to the doctor,” said Knowles, who is single. “And so when I told my mom and I was like, ‘I need to go the hospital,’ she’s like, ‘What?’ She knew something was wrong, me going to the hospital.’ ”
Knowles headed to the emergency room at the Rome hospital and was immediately admitted. The next month became a complete whitewash for him. When he finally was allowed to breathe on his own and came off his heavy medications to regain full consciousness, he wasn’t even in the same hospital.
“I walked in, and I checked in, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up,” Knowles said. “I think I was actually out, like, 29 or 30 days. So it was a pretty scary deal.
“I still really didn’t know what was going on. I can remember waking up and actually I was in a different hospital than I went to. I was an hour south of where I live — the (initial) one I went to didn’t have a machine they needed to put me on so they had to transfer me down to right outside of Atlanta, so I didn’t know really where I was at or what was going on. And I was still, you know, on meds and all loopy, so it took me probably a week to really figure out why I was in the hospital.”
Knowles’s parents, who kept vigil by his bedside throughout the month, and his doctors soon filled him in. He had an elevated triglycerides count and was diagnosed with pancreatitis, which caused such heavy inflammation in his body that it was squeezing and cutting off oxygen to his other organs. It also collapsed one of his lungs and doctors had to put him on an ECMO machine that aided in adding oxygen to his blood and healing his damaged organs.
“My mom, she still ain’t showed me all the pictures of me hooked up to all them tubes,” Knowles said. “I still haven’t seen them yet, and I don’t know if I ever want to, really, to be honest.
“I guess until it was probably a few days after I come to that I was like, ‘Dang, this is a pretty serious deal here.’ I mean, I was on life support for like 22 days I think. There’s a lot of things going through your head when I realized what I was going through. Yeah, you’re thinking, Am I going to be able to race again? But actually it’s more like, Dang, am I going to live through this? Or am I going to make it out? Or am I going to walk?”
Knowles fortunately didn’t have to undergo any invasive surgeries. His body gradually recovered on its own. He was finally discharged from the hospital Oct. 31 after 44 days, but while his internal problems were resolving, the physical toll of being bedridden for so long remained.
“I lost over 40 pounds, and just laying there, I lost all of my muscle,” Knowles said. “I didn’t have to learn to walk, but I had to, like, physically be able to walk. I knew how to. I just couldn’t because I couldn’t hold my own weight up. I couldn’t walk 5 foot before I had to sit down and take a break.”
With Knowles needing to rebuild his strength and stamina, he was unable to immediately to immediately return to his job — he operates Knowles Race Parts and Bodies as a solo effort — and stayed with his parents at their home outside Atlanta until after the first of the year. He started returning to normal in mid-November when he visited Senoia (Ga.) Raceway during the FloRacing Night in America Peach State Classic. Racing proved to be a nice tonic.
“My mom and dad, they don’t live but 10 or 15 minutes from Senoia, and we were sitting there on the couch and I actually had done turned Flo on and was about to tune in,” Knowles said. “I was like, ‘Man, let’s just ride down there and see some people. That’s do me some good. If I get tired or if I get cold’ — it was kind of chilly that night and I’d done lost so much weight I’d get cold easy — ‘we’ll just come back home and finish watching it.’
“We ended up going and that was good, too, just to see everybody and hear the motors and just see the racing live. Because in the hospital, we had (races) on, we had two iPads and all that going, but it ain’t like going. That helped get things rolling a lot easier, or at least better.”
Knowles visited his shop the weekend after Thanksgiving while still regaining his strength. He returned to his residence in Rome and went back to working his parts business the first weekend in January.
Then the thoughts of racing again bubbled up in Knowles, who grew up in the sport watching his father and turned his first competitive laps in a Dirt Late Model in 2002 when he was a teenager.
“That was the main question from everybody: ‘When are you gonna race?’ ” Knowles said. “I was like, I wonder when that day will be that I wake up and be like, ‘I think I can make a lap.’
“And so a couple Saturdays ago they had a practice over at Talladega, so I was like, ‘Shoot, I might go over there. I can just practice. If I get tired, I can pull in.’ You know, it ain’t that big a deal. I can just stop or whatever, so we went over. And I made it through it and it was good, so I was like, if I can stay healthy through this week, I’ll go racing.”
There was no better recovery tool for Knowles than climbing back into his race car March 7 for some fast circuits.
“That’s what I was telling my dad,” he said. “I was like, ‘Shoot, y’all at least should have put me in a two-seater car and let me make a lap the day I got out of the hospital because that’s the best medicine right there.’ I mean, it got everything flowing right.”
Last Saturday put him back in his Longhorn Chassis No. 66 owned by Matt Wester of Gadsden, Ala., who has fielded Knowles’s Dirt Late Models for the past decade. He began the program with a bad pill draw (97) that lined him up seventh in his heat, but he promptly roared forward to win the preliminary. Knowles started third in the 20-lap feature and fell back to fifth at the initial green flag before rallying to finish a solid second.
“It was a win in our book, you know, for as bad as I was and I really didn’t even know if I was gonna be able to do it again,” Knowles said. “Running second, we was all tickled.
Knowles said he’s “still not 100 percent like strength-wise and stamina and all that” and expects it will take another couple months of exercise “to get back to normal.” But he sure felt fine at Talladega.
“I think the adrenaline was going so much that it didn’t even bother me,” Knowles said. “I wasn’t worried about heart rate or being tired or anything. Everything was good. It was a good night, and that was kind of a boost to everybody — my car owner, my mom and dad, everybody really.
“There was a lot of people, even like racers, that was glad to see me back going. There was even a guy that told me, he’s like, ‘You know, when I got passed, I was happy I got passed by you.’
“I’ve had so many supporters through this deal, and just all the confidence-boosting, like, ‘Oh, you got this,’” he continued. “I was like, ‘Dang, I didn’t know that many people liked me.’ It’s a crazy the amount of support and stuff you get when times get hard from all the racing people.”
Now Knowles is eyeing a much active racing schedule in 2026 than he logged last year before his sickness. He made a mere 10 starts in ’25 and didn’t win a feature — his last victory, in fact, came in September 2021 in a Crate event at Talladega — so he’s anxious to bring that drought to an end.
Most of Knowles’s racing this decade has been in the Crate Late Model ranks, which steadily became more of his focus through the 2010s as tracks in his region shifted away from weekly Super Late Model action. This season, though, he plans to return to the Super Late Model division for time since 2020 in a new Longhorn Chassis equipped with a powerplant from Race Engine Design.
Knowles has enjoyed Super Late Model success, winning more than two dozen times in the headline class. His crowning achievement was a 2009 Lucas Oil Series triumph over the late Scott Bloomquist at Cleveland (Tenn.) Speedway driving a car fielded by the track’s then owner Monty Morrow, but he’s also been victorious on the Schaeffer’s Southern Nationals (he finished second in points in 2019), the Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series and the Southern Regional Racing Series.
“I’m going next week to practice with the Super at Dixie (Speedway in Woodstock, Ga.),” said Knowles, who most recent Super Late Model victory came in October 2020 at Talladega. “We're going to do a lot of the Crate Racin’ USA races and then just pick-and-choose the Super races around our area that make sense to go to. The Super, everything’s brand new, and I can’t wait to do that. If we do pretty good we might run Super more than the Crate this year. I might be like, ‘I don’t wanna run that Crate no more.’ If my health’s good, I wouldn’t mind doing the South Nationals deal again.”
Knowles emphasized that his health will be “the main determination” for his racing as he takes “race-by-race and week-by-week.” He’s doing everything he can to make sure he takes better care of his body, including reducing his intake of greasy foods (he’s eating a lot more grilled fish and chicken), exercising regularly and visiting a doctor for checkups.
“As good as I feel right now, I look back and I’m like, ‘Dadgum, I was sick probably two or three years,’ ” Knowles said. “You know how we do it when we race — on the go all the time, tired all the time. It’s just like, ‘It’s all right, it’ll be all right.’ But it was just wearing me down and getting worse and worse.”
Knowles came way too close to passing away with so many years — and so many races — still ahead of him. It was a trying experience, but it’s given him a new perspective on life.
“It’s made me realize a lot and look at a whole life different,” said Knowles, who next planned action is with his Crate at Dixie’s opener on April 11. “Don’t take nothing for granted because you’re definitely not promised tomorrow. It’s made think about that a whole lot.
“And there’s only one person in charge and that’s God,” he added, “because I promise you, I wouldn’t have come out of that without Him. It made me realize that more.”
