SELINSGROVE, Pa. (Sept. 21) — Racing at Selinsgrove Speedway proved to be the perfect tonic for Darrell Lanigan.

Surprisingly winless through the first 35 races of his return season to full-time World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series competition, Lanigan finally broke through at a track that has treated him very well in the past. The 48-year-old standout from Union, Ky., took advantage of a pole starting spot to score a convincing flag-to-flag victory in Saturday night’s 40-lap Jeff’s Auto Body National Open.

The $10,000 triumph was Lanigan’s 73rd career WoO checkered flag — second on the circuit’s all-time win list behind Josh Richards’s 76 — but first since Sept. 6, 2015, also at Selinsgrove during his last season as a regular on the national tour until 2019.

“It has been awhile (between wins) — with the Outlaws anyway,” said Lanigan, who restarted his own team and returned to the WoO trail with his Club 20 Race Cars this season after spending the 2016-18 campaigns driving for Clint Bowyer Racing on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series.

Lanigan was never seriously challenged in a race that was slowed by four caution flags, including the final pair on laps 33 and 37. He built an edge of over three seconds on outside polesitter Ricky Weiss of Headingley, Manitoba, during the feature’s middle stages before the late slowdowns tightened the field and shrank his winning margin to 0.656 of a second over the 30-year-old Canadian, who once again found himself agonizingly close to his elusive first-ever WoO triumph in his family-owned Bloomquist machine.

Runaway WoO points leader Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., started and finished third in the Rocket Chassis house car, keeping him at 18 WoO wins in 2019 and tied with Josh Richards for the tour’s single-season victory record. He shot ahead of Weiss for second place at the race’s initial green but only held the position for two circuits before ceding it to Weiss and settling into third for the remainder of the distance.

Shane Clanton of Zebulon, Ga., who won his fourth WoO feature of ’19 the previous night at Outlaw Speedway in Dundee, N.Y., advanced from the ninth starting to fourth in 21 laps but climbed no higher in his Greg Bruening-owned Capital Race Car. Eighth-starter Gregg Satterlee of Indiana, Pa., who captured a WoO feature at Selinsgrove in 2013, completed the top five in his father Gary’s XR1 Rocket mount.

Lanigan acknowledged that he had a good feeling about his chances for snapping his WoO drought as soon as he pulled into the Selinsgrove pit area. He entered Saturday’s event as a three-time WoO winner at the sprawling half-mile, having claimed the National Open three years in a row from 2013-15.

“Yeah, you think that,” Lanigan said when asked if he thought Selinsgrove represented his best chance at a win before the 2019 WoO schedule ends. “I love coming here. I’ve run good here, won here, but the cars are completely different from what we had then (during his run of Selinsgrove success). Setups are completely different. Tire choice is completely different — we ran 1450s, now we run 70s. It’s a completely different deal.

“But still,” he added, “you go out there, and it’s a place that just fits your driving a little bit. When I went out there and hot-lapped, I was like, ‘Man, this thing feels really good.’ In the heat it was real good. Then we just got lucky enough to draw the pole there (for the reason) and that helped out a bunch — and so did having a good car.”

The strength of Lanigan’s No. 29 was evident when he began negotiating slower traffic. His advantage on Weiss expanded as he lapped vehicles.

“When we got to lapped traffic it just felt like we were 20 miles an hour faster then ‘em,” Lanigan said, “so it just made it a little bit easier to pass ‘em.”

The late restarts — on lap 33 when Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa., slowed in turn four and lap 37 when Mason Zeigler of Chalk Hill, Pa., fell off the pace with a flat tire in turn two — helped Lanigan as well.

“You never want a restart,” said Lanigan, who sits fifth in the WoO standings but is just 28 points behind Clanton with five events remaining on the schedule. “But it seems like when you come to this place, with as big as it is, air makes a big difference, so I definitely didn’t mind restarts tonight.”

Weiss did attempt to dive underneath Lanigan through turns one and two on the final restarts, but the bids were to no avail.

“I never did see Ricky,” Lanigan said. “I actually watched him in the heat race and he had a really good car around that bottom, so I knew if he was gonna beat me, he was gonna beat me around that bottom. But (turns) three and four, I wasn’t gonna give up that bottom, and (in turns) one and two, I could run around that top fast enough that I didn’t think he was gonna pass me on the bottom there.”

Weiss conceded that he simply wasn’t quick enough to deal with Lanigan in his first-ever visit to Selinsgrove.

“It was his night,” said Weiss, who remained third in the WoO standings after recording his sixth runner-up finish on the tour this season.”I felt like we were a better car early, but he would just get around the lapped cars just in time and they’d seem to hold me up. At corner entry is when I’d get to ‘em and then I’d lose the nose a little bit and slow and he’d be able to get them coming off the corner, which was kind of preferred.

“Finally we got some clean air and I was kind of starting to be able to catch him, and then the caution come out. After that he was definitely the better car in clean air.”

Weiss, who switched to his second car for Selinsgrove duty after a run-in the previous night at Outlaw Speedway with the lapped Brent Larson of Lake Elmo, Minn., sent him spinning out of third place with significant rearend damage, didn’t show any frustration after another WoO near-miss. He felt fortunate that he was able to recover from a poor qualifying effort — because a spark plug wire that fell off left his engine down on power — to win his heat race and start on the front row of the feature.

“Sooner or later it’s going to go the other way,” Weiss said of his continued pursuit of a WoO victory.

Notes: Lanigan’s fourth career Selinsgrove National Open victory left him just one win shy of Danville, Pa.’s Jeff Rine, who has a record five triumphs in the 21-year-old event’s all-time. … Rine, who scored his first-ever WoO win at Selinsgrove in 2017, advanced from the 18th starting spot to finish 10th driving a brand-new Longhorn Race Car. … The A-main’s hardest crash occurred on lap three when Brent Larson nearly flipped in turn one and Hayes Mattern of Beavertown, Pa., slammed the outside wall. Both drivers escaped injury but were left with heavily damaged cars. … The first caution flag of the feature came on the original start when Chad Julius of York, Pa., spun into the turn-three wall before even reaching the green flag. He continued on and finished 20th. … Coleby Frye of Dover, Pa., crossed the finish line in 12th, but WoO officials placed him last in the rundown as a penalty for a late-race run-in with Bryan Bernheisel of Lebanon, Pa. … With Sheppard leading the WoO standings over Clanton by a commanding 288 points, he essentially only needs to start the tour’s final five features to clinch his second $100,000 series championship in three years.