GRANITE CITY, Ill. — Leading half of Thursday’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series race at Tri-City Speedway but settling for fourth didn’t sit well with Jimmy Owens. So he did all he could to change that on Friday.
And change that the Newport, Tenn., driver did, outdueling Shannon Babb through the first half of the race and leading the final 24 laps of the NAPA Know How 50 to earn $12,000 and his second event of the season on the national tour.
“I’m glad we put on a good show for everybody,” Owens said in victory lane after earning his 62nd career series victory but first at Tri-City. “We’ve been leading a lot, tore up a lot of stuff. We had a good car last night and we worked together and made a few tweaks for tonight, and everything went our way. We’re glad to get a good win.”
Owens took his first Tri-City checkers nearly two seconds ahead of 15th-starting Earl Pearson Jr. of Jacksonville, Fla., as the series heads toward back-to-back events Saturday and Sunday at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., one of his best tracks.
Josh Richards of Shinnston, W.Va., gave up second to Pearson on the last lap to settle for third while Stormy Scott of Las Cruces, N.M., was fourth for his best series finish of the season. Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, completed the top five, making a steady advance forward from the 23rd starting to finish fifth.
Thursday’s winner Tyler Erb of New Waverly, Texas, wasn’t a factor Friday in finishing 15th while two other key drivers fell from contention.
Series points leader Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., started alongside Owens on the front row and contended early, but he fell out of the top five on the 35th lap and faded the rest of the way with nosepiece issues, ending up 16th.
Babb, the Moweaqua, Ill., driver who led laps 13 and 15 and 24-25 in a back-and-forth battle with Owens, retired on lap 32 while running second. He’d slapped the turn-four concrete with some force while battling Owens on the 20th lap.
After the Tri-City event, teams packed up and headed West for Wheatland, Mo., and Lucas Oil Speedway, the tour’s showplace oval where Owens has won eight features, including four Show-Me 100s. But the three-time series champion wasn’t making any predictions after his Tri-City victory.
“Any time you get a win (it) makes the next trip so much easier,” Owens said. “It’s two nights at Wheatland, it’s a tough crowd, you never can tell what’ll happen.”
Pearson’s runner-up finish followed Thursday’s fifth-place finish, two solid performances after 16th- and 21st-place performances the previous week.
“In the heat race, we knocked the nose off of it, and my crew, they busted their butt to get it all back together. Anyway, my hat’s off to all them guys and all our sponsors,” Pearson said. “We had a good night tonight. We’ll go to Wheatland and see what we can do.”
After starting in the eighth row, Pearson was ninth on a lap-32 restart and came alive, quickly breaking into the top five. He took third from Scott on lap 48 and and then swept around Richards to grab the second spot on the white-flag lap.
“I got too tight around the bottom so I had to move up and try something a little bit different,” Pearson said. “We’d been running through that middle and the car wasn’t quite so tight up there. Anyway, we started (15th) and to come home second here … I love this place. It always races good.”
Richards improved on Thursday’s disappointing 14th-place run, but he knew a runner-up finish was within his grasp after holding the second spot beginning on lap 36.
“We had a really good car. Last night we shot ourselves in the foot and got the nose folded under and just had to settle for a bad finish,” Richards said. “But tonight, I feel like I shoud’ve moved up on the last lap — I wanted to. I saw my (crew) guys signal someone was coming, and I think I could’ve held Earl off.
“But we still had a good car. Jimmy was good. I could keep up with him pretty good there early, and he could roll the bottom of (turns) one and two just a tick better, and every so slightly in three and four. The track, if you could hit it right, it was really good."
The race was slowed by four cautions for minor incidents, including Babb’s lap-32 departure. Shanon Buckingham of Morristown, Tenn., slowed on the 11th lap and was pushed to the infield while Jeremy Conaway spun for a lap-20 caution. Debris brought out a caution on lap-32 restart.
Notes: Owens is second all-time in series victories with 62. … Owens is the 11th series winner in 21 races at Tri-City. … Devin Moran had rear-end problems in prelims and didn’t even start his heat race, but improved 18 positions for a fifth-place finish in the feature after taking his first series provisional of 2019. … Series points leader Jonathan Davenport left Tri-City with disappointing 18th- and 16th-place finishes, his worst consecutive performances of the season. … Eighteen of 25 starters were running at the finish, all on the lead lap.
