Rocket team shifts to Lucas Oil tour
The Rocket Chassis house car team and driver Brandon Sheppard will pursue the 2022 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship, ending their bid for a third consecutive and fifth overall World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series title as a pairing. | Column | Video
Sheppard, 29, of New Berlin, Ill., currently leads the Lucas Oil Series points standings and is third in the WoO standings, 66 points behind leader Dennis Erb Jr. With the tours having conflicting events this weekend, the Shinnston, W.Va.-based Rocket operation announced its plans to spend the remainder of the season chasing the Lucas Oil Series.
“The past few years we’ve come out of Speedweeks either atop the Lucas Oil points or near the top of the standings,” Rocket house car owner Mark Richards (pictured above right with Sheppard) said in a press release. “This year was the same, and after Speedweeks we had a meeting as a team to discuss if we wanted to try something different this year and it was a unanimous decision to go after the Lucas Oil title.
“The World Racing Group and the World of Outlaws have been great to us over the past several years and we are grateful for all the support they’ve shown us. We’re just to a point that it was time to shuffle the deck and try something new — and who knows? Next year we might be back chasing a World of Outlaws Late Model Series championship.”
Sheppard has piloted the iconic Rocket No. 1 to the WoO championship in four of the last five years and with his first victory of 2022 on Saturday at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio, tied Josh Richards atop the circuit’s all-time win list with 78 triumphs. Mark Richards has been a WoO stalwart with his house car team since the tour’s reincarnation in 2004, winning a record eight championships (including four with his son Josh) and 154 features (75 with Josh, 74 with Sheppard and five with Bart Hartman).
A Lucas Oil Series regular during the 2015-16 season, Sheppard has a tour-leading four victories this season and a 15-point edge in the standings entering this weekend’s doubleheader at Tri-City Speedway in Granite City, Ill., and Macon (Ill.) Speedway.
“I think the most exciting aspect for our team is that we’ll get to run some events and visit some tracks this year that either we haven’t been to in a long time or maybe we’ve never even been to,” Richards said of joining the Lucas Oil Series. “We are going to put everything we’ve got into getting our first Lucas Oil championship this year.”
Richards said his team will enter selected WoO and other special events this season, including this week’s Castrol FloRacing Night in America twinbill at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio (Tuesday) and Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway (Wednesday).
Correction: Fixes number of house car wins with WoO to 154, adding one to Hartman
