DirtonDirt.com Dispatches
Dispatches: Weekend’s flurry of first-time winners
Michael Rouse won his first Ultimate feature. (Kevin Ritchie)
The latest notes and quotes from Dirt Late Model events nationwide from April 22-24, including World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series action at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio, Lucas Oil MLRA events at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., and Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals events in North Carolina and Tennessee:
Flurry of first-timers
Veteran official Kelley Carlton has seen a lot over his many years in the Dirt Late Model game, so when he points out a trend he speaks from a position of knowledge.
And as Carlton was heading home after officiating Saturday night’s Tar River Rumble at County Line Raceway in Elm City, N.C., in his position as director of the Ultimate Southeast Super Late Model Series, something certainly stuck out to him about the division’s results he was perusing.
“Lots of first-time Super winners this weekend,” Carlton wrote in a message to DirtonDirt.com. “Pretty unique stretch.”
Indeed, new blood popped up in victory lanes at multiple special Super Late Model events over the past three days but especially on Saturday. After the Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals boasted first-ever Super Late Model feature winners on Thursday at Tri-County Racetrack in Brasstown, N.C. (18-year-old Garrett Smith of Eatonton, Ga.) and Friday at Crossville (Tenn.) Speedway (Carson Ferguson of Charlotte, N.C.), Saturday produced an outbreak of first-timers.
Drivers earning first-ever Super Late Model wins on Saturday included:
• Michael Rouse of Wilson, N.C., who pocketed $5,000 for his flag-to-flag Ultimate Southeast triumph in front of Carlton at County Line. The 31-year-old has enjoyed success in Limited Late Model competition, but Saturday’s checkered was “really a dream come true for me,” he said. “I’ve always to really win a Super race.”
• Adam Yarbrough of Denver, N.C., was left absolutely flabbergasted by his first-ever Super Late Model victory in Saturday’s 40-lap Carolina Clash Super Late Model Series event at Travelers Rest (S.C.) Speedway. He thanked his mother and father after emerging from his car (he emotionally said that without them “I wouldn’t even be here”) but couldn’t get many more words out to the Clash announcer. “I don’t even know what to say,” he said through dripping emotion before heading off to celebrate with his family and team.
Racers recording first career regional Super Late Model touring series or otherwise notable victories included:
• Jadon Frame of Decherd, Tenn., won Saturday’s 53-lap Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals A-main at Clarksville (Tenn.) Speedway, earning a career-high payday of $10,053 after outdueling Ferguson for the lead midway through the race and turning back Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., in its late stages. The 23-year-old praised his parents and car owners Joe and Tish Denby (“I couldn’t do anything without them”) and his “flawless” Capital Race Car and maintained that Clarksville was a track where he “never thought I’d get a win.”
• Camaron Marlar of Winfield, Tenn., claimed his first-ever XR Southern All Star Series triumph with a wire-to-wire run at the front of the pack in Saturday’s 40-lap feature at Smoky Mountain Speedway in Maryville, Tenn. The younger brother of Dirt Late Model star Mike Marlar proclaimed that his Danny McGlothlin-owned Longhorn Chassis “was on point tonight” to get him the $5,000 winner’s check, but his joy was tempered a bit by a unusual post-race incident: after he took the checkered flag he couldn’t avoid running into the spun lapped car driven by Dakota Smith, who wrecked in Marlar’s path in turn one. According to Marlar, the damage to the car will prevent him from entering Tuesday’s Castrol FloRacing Night in America event at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, as he had planned.
• Another notable special-event winner on Saturday was Justin Reed of Camp Point, Ill., who tallied a career-high $5,098 victory in the 50-lap Garry Swibold Memorial for DIRTcar Super Late Models at Peoria (Ill.) Speedway. It was his first Super Late Model win since June 5, 2016, in a Big 10 Series race at Adams County Speedway in Quincy, Ill., and came in a Jeff Curtin Construction-backed Rocket Chassis sporting an orange-and-blue scheme and the No. 1ST as a throwback to the car he drove in the mid-2010s.
Back in action
After Brian Shirley finished second in Saturday night’s 53-lap Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals feature at Clarksville (Tenn.) Speedway, he didn’t sound like a driver who entered the weekend with 18 starts already under his belt this season.
All those other races, after all, seem like a distant memory to the 40-year-old from Chatham, Ill. He’s been idle for two months since spending much of January and February in the Southeast competing in Georgia-Florida Speedweeks events — a stretch of racing that was quite forgettable for Shirley anyway with a best finish of just 10th.
“We just gotta get racing,” Shirley said after his Clarksville outing capped a return to competition that he began Friday with a struggle-filled Spring Nationals night at Crossville (Tenn.) Speedway. “We’ve been sitting at home since Florida, and my car owner (Bob Cullen) always tells me that we gotta go race. Unfortunately the weather’s been pretty bad, and we went through building a couple new cars.”
Shirley, who has returned to running Rocket Chassis after selling the Longhorn cars he used during Speedweeks, had two planned April trips — to Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, and to Iowa for shows at Davenport Speedway and 34 Raceway — aborted due to early weather-related cancelations. He finally hit the track again with an excursion to Tennessee and he experienced some new-car blues at Crossville before hitting his stride again at Clarksville.
“We didn’t get to race last night (at Crossville) with having ignition problems, and just a new car and everything, everything’s just a little different,” said Shirley, who pulled up lame on the opening lap of Crossville’s feature and immediately retired for an 18th-place finish.
Shirley had a solid run at Clarksville, fighting forward from the fifth starting spot to spend the late stages chasing eventual winner Jadon Frame to the checkered flag.
“Honestly, he was actually better than us,” Shirley said of Frame. “We’ll get back racing, get back to where we need to be. We just gotta get some laps.”
Siblings shine
Johnny Scott flashed a big smile after winning Friday night’s 30-lap Lucas Oil Midwest LateModel Association Spring Nationals opener at Lucas Oil Speedway. His twin brother, Stormy, wasn't quite as happy with his third-place finish, but he was still pleased. And both drivers were, of course, thinking about each other.
“I’ve got to thank my brother,” Johnny said of his sibling. “Without him I wouldn’t be here, because he keeps me in the loop and tells me what I probably should run.”
“Congratulations to them,” Stormy proclaimed, nodding his head toward his brother’s victory lane celebration. “I guess if I ain’t winning, at least he is.”
The 32-year-old brothers from Las Cruces, N.M., threatened to record a 1-2 finish in the first of two MLRA race nights at the 3/8-mile oval in Wheatland, Mo. Johnny led the entire distance off the pole while Stormy was almost in position to move to second place when Kolby Vandenbergh slid high on lap 20 and tumbled to sixth — if only Stormy hadn’t ceded third place to Jason Papich at about the same time.
Whatever the case, it was still a great night for the Scotts. Both racers have experienced struggles this season, but Friday’s program provided evidence that they’re on the upswing.
That’s especially true for Johnny, whose $5,000 triumph backed up his first checkered flag of 2022 in April 9’s MLRA show at 81 Speedway in Park City, Kan.
“We kind of hit on some stuff over there in Wichita and we’ve kind of been sticking with that,” said Johnny, who was victorious in consecutive starts for the first time in his brief Dirt Late Model career (the modified ace entered the division in mid-2019). “We’re on a little hot streak. Hopefully we can keep it up. I think it comes down to qualifying good and starting up front because I ain’t really changed much other than that. I think anybody here in this top three probably could’ve started on the pole and they would’ve been hard to get around.”
Stormy, meanwhile, has fallen behind in the brothers’ head-to-head Late Model win totals (Johnny now owns five in his career to Stormy’s two), but a third-place finish was his best of the 2022 season. He was also aware of his shortcomings in the feature.
“I just wasn’t quite tight enough on entry to be able to arc out kind of like those guys were to keep up speed,” said Stormy, whose previous best run this season was a fourth on Jan. 8 at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park. “I more or less was kind of running the bottom, kind of turning the corner into three straightaways. But I think we’re fairly close.”
Confrontation at Crossville
Cory Hedgecock and Garrett Smith traded sliders and paint repeatedly during one particularly raucous mid-race stretch of Friday night’s 40-lap Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals feature at Crossville (Tenn.) Speedway. Only one of the drivers survived to reach the finish line.
As the 18-year-old Smith registered a fourth-place finish with his bruised and battered machine, Hedgecock was in the pit area with his disabled car, stewing over his untimely demise that left him with a 12th-place result.
Hedgecock, 29, of Loudon, Tenn., and his teenage rival from Eatonton, Ga., found themselves in a rough-and-tumble battle for second as the race’s halfway point approached. It notably started to become physical on lap 19 when Hedgecock made contact with Smith rounding turns three and four, and moments later, in turns one and two, Smith replied with a slider across the nose of Hedgecock’s car.
The tussle came to a head on lap 21 when Smith dove to the inside through turns one and two and contact — Smith’s right-front to Hedgecock’s left-rear — was made. Smith managed to maintain control after an anxious moment on the backstretch, but the chain-reaction stack-up farther back caused another car to spin and bring out the caution flag.
With the field slowing for the caution, Smith raced up past a couple cars and drove alongside Hedgecock on the inside of turns one and two to express his displeasure. Contact occurred, this time Smith’s right rear to Hedgecock’s left front; Smith twirled sideways and then continued on while Hedgecock stopped in turn two because his mount’s left-front had been ripped off and its suspension damaged, necessitating wrecker service to remove it from the track.
Hedgecock removed his helmet, climbed out of his car, tossed his head-and-neck restraint into the cockpit and stalked off down the backstretch. He was met by a Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals official who walked alongside him as he angrily walked through the center of the infield to the edge of the homestretch, where Smith’s car was parked for perusal for officials. Hedgecock yelled at Smith while being restrained by the official, then turned around and walked alone toward the backstretch.
Before the race was restarted, Hedgecock made a final display of his anger toward Smith: Standing on the inside of the backstretch, he directed a throat-slash gesture toward Smith.
Smith, who was coming off his first-ever Super Late Model victory in the previous night’s Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals event at Tri-County Racetrack in Brasstown, N.C., remained on the track and salvaged a fourth-place finish in the race won by Carson Ferguson of Concord, N.C.
Hedgecock, meanwhile, wrote on Facebook afterward that he would not renew acquaintances with Smith in Saturday’s $10,053-to-win Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals event at Clarksville (Tenn.) Speedway. While noting that he felt the Crossville feature “was easily our race,” he said he’s parking his Super Late Model for the remainder of the weekend because it sustained too much damage to be immediately repaired; it was his second DNF is as many nights after he pulled off following a spin in Thursday's A-main at Tri-County.
Good run wiped out
Brandon Sheppard was pleased after he chased winner Tyler Erb across the finish line in Friday night’s 40-lap World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series feature at Atomic Speedway.
“To come out with a good run and have a really good car like we did, it’s definitely exciting for tomorrow night and just shows that we’re getting ‘er dialed in a little bit better for the rest of the year,” said Sheppard, who challenged Erb repeatedly in the closing circuits for settling for an apparent second-place result in the opener of the Alma, Ohio, track’s doubleheader weekend.
But the 29-year-old star’s demeanor changed after he went through postrace technical inspection with WoO officials. His Rocket Chassis house car failed the droop check portion of the process, exceeding the maximum allowable rear-deck height of 51 inches and leading to his disqualification from the race and a 25th-place finish in the official rundown.
Rocket Chassis house car owner Mark Richards didn’t dispute the ruling.
“It was on us,” Richards related. “We went a little too far on a spring adjustment.”
Richards noted that the droop DQ was “the same thing that happened to Mark Whitener at Ocala,” referring to the Big Frog Motorsports driver losing his qualifying time and heat-race transfer spot in Feb. 1’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event at Florida’s Bubba Raceway Park due to a droop infraction.
“Really no argument,” Richards said.
The disqualification cost Sheppard a lucrative payday ($7,000, including a $1,000 bonus for being the highest-finishing WoO regular) and dropped him from second in the WoO standings (24 points behind leader Dennis Erb Jr.) to third (70 behind Erb and 28 in arrears of second-place Max Blair).
Terbo’s Buckeye home
Atomic Speedway is becoming a favorite stop for Tyler Erb.
The 3/8-mile track in Alma, Ohio, was, of course, the site of Erb’s first-ever World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series triumphs — back-to-back checkered flags on Sept. 28-29, 2018.
And on Friday night the 25-year-old native of New Waverly, Texas, finally was a WoO victor again, winning Atomic’s 40-lap feature to kick off the national tour’s doubleheader weekend at the Buckeye State facility.
“I love coming here,” Erb said after banking the $10,000 top prize. “It’s almost my home track since I live here now (in St. Marys, Ohio).”
Erb hasn’t been a WoO regular since 2018 when he broke through at Atomic late in the season — he joined Eric Brock’s Best Performance Motorsports in 2019 and has chased the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series ever since — so he hasn’t had a significant number of opportunities to add to his WoO win total. He wasn’t even permitted to enter WoO events for one year (August 2020-August 2021) because of penalties he received for an incident at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis.
The three-and-a-half-year WoO drought came to a halt, though, with Erb’s return to Atomic, where he led every lap of the feature and held off a late challenge from four-time WoO champion Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill. Erb said he just stayed hard on the gas to turn back B-Shepp, who nosed underneath Erb several times through turns one and two but was unable to pull ahead.
“I couldn’t really tell where he was making time because I could see him dive beneath me every time,” Erb said of Sheppard, who was later disqualified and placed 25th in the final rundown because his Rocket Chassis house car failed the post-race droop rule inspection. “We’d kind of leave even sometimes, sometimes I’d get a better run. I was like, ‘Well, I’ll chop him getting into three.’
“After I took the checkered I felt like it was rubbered higher up and he was probably just, like, entering high and crossing down.”
Actually, Sheppard would have liked to employ the strategy that Erb mused about.
“Definitely going into one there on the last lap I was kicking myself for trying to run through that middle down there,” Sheppard, who crossed the finish line 0.503 of a second behind Erb, said before learning of his DQ. “I wish I would’ve went from the the top to the bottom and tried to be closer to him in three and four, but he did a good job.”
Erb’s third overall victory of 2022 — he previously won on Jan. 14 at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park on in Lucas Oil Series action on April 9 at Hagerstown (Md.) Speedway — left him “super pumped” and primed for Saturday’s $15,000-to-win finale at Atomic.
“We tend to win in pairs,” he said, thinking back to his sweep of 2018’s WoO twinbill at Atomic, “so hopefully that translates tomorrow.”
Soft tire costs Overton
ELLISVILLE, Fla. — Brandon Overton admittedly selected the wrong right-rear tire compound for Friday’s Florida Dirt Nationals feature at All-Tech Raceway.
The Evans, Ga., driver saw his potential seventh victory of the season slip through his hands when his softer choice of tire faded into the clutches of Tim McCreadie, who powered past Overton for the win using the outside of the slick track with 16 laps to go in the XR Super Series event.
McCreadie opted for a harder right-rear tire that lifted him to victory from the 10th starting spot. Overton, meanwhile, settled for fourth from the pole, and couldn’t cap a perfect night in which he set another fast time and won another heat race.
“We gambled on the soft tire. Last time we were here, (Jimmy) Owens won the Lucas race on a soft tire. So, we put a soft one on,” Overton said. “Once I got the lead (on lap 24), I knew I used up as much rubber as I could.”
Overton started from the pole of Friday’s 40-lap, $25,000-to-win feature, but didn’t lead his first lap until the 24th circuit. Outside polesitter Kyle Bronson shot by Overton on the initial start and led the first 23 laps. That forced Overton to run harder than he’d like, and though Overton made his gains around the bottom of turn three and turn four’s exit, he couldn’t combat McCreadie’s charge around the top.
“I couldn’t leave (the corner) as good as I was,” Overton said. “I was like, ‘Man, this is probably the time to have a harder right rear on.’ Once Timmy passed me around the top carrying a little bit of speed, I just couldn’t do that. I already had our tires too hot and kind of out there with a greasy feeling.”
“When I saw him out there, I actually had time to move up, but I couldn’t stick (it),” Overton added. “Once I moved up I started sliding. Just the wrong tire. That’s what boils down to it. We did good tonight. Put ourselves in position, won the heat, had a good night going and like I said, just messed up on the tire call.”
Overton finished ninth and 11th in two races at the technical half-mile in February, so Friday’s performance — an 11th top-five in 27 starts this year — was well received.
“Definitely better than what we were in February when we came, so we’ll build on it and go again tomorrow,” Overton said. “We’re going to do everything we did tonight up until qualifying, maybe tweak on it a little bit, and just try to put the right tire on. You never can tell. It just depends on what it does with that water truck, and today was windy and sunny. It might not be like that tomorrow. We’ll just take good notes and come back to see if we can win ($50,000) tomorrow.” — Kyle McFadden
Not quite for Freeman
On a restart with six laps remaining Thursday at Tri-County Racetrack in Brasstown, N.C., Payton Freeman of Commerce, Ga., knew exactly where he was going — the high groove at the 3/8-mile oval.
After making up ground on the top side, Freeman was measuring up second-running Josh Putnam and leader Garrett Smith, the race’s eventual winner. When the green flag appeared, Freeman’s high-flying No. F1 rolled around Putnam and he had his sights set on Smith next. Alas, a caution flag appeared for Heath Hindman’s spin, and Freeman’s edge was erased when crew members signaled to Putnam and Smith to move up a lane.
While Smith notched his first career Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals victory and collected $4,053, Freeman ended up settling for second in the 40-lapper.
“I feel like we really got it rolling there at the end,” Freeman said. “(Crew members) moved (the competitors) up there. That’s part of it, I guess. It is what it is. We’ll take our second and move on.
“We haven’t had the best of luck and we’ve had a really fast race car. So it’s nice to be able to show something for it tonight.”
Freeman lowered the track record on his first lap of time trials, but then got into the fence on the second lap. He thanked crew members and others for pitching in to get his car back into action.
“I’m disappointed that I put us behind. There in qualifying, the first lap was really good and I’m proud of that. But I was just trying too hard the second lap to go faster and I put us behind,” he said. “We didn’t really have time to work on our race car like we needed to. So I’ll take this one on me. I’ve gotta do a better job at that.”
