Lucas Oil Speedway
Faith wanes but Pierce's talent shines at Show-Me
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Bobby Pierce (32) overtakes Jonathan Davenport (49). (heathlawsonphotos.com)
WHEATLAND, Mo. (May 24) — Bobby Pierce wasn’t happy. Two nights into the 33rd Show-Me 100 weekend, he stood in the Lucas Oil Speedway pit area after a miserable 10th-place finish in Friday’s 40-lap Don & Billie Gibson Tribute and expressed utter dismay with his inability to handle the slick 3/8-mile oval. | RaceWire
This was not the typically confident, No. 1-ranked Dirt Late Model driver in the country. The 28-year-old star from Oakwood, Ill., was so flummoxed in his first attempt at the Show-Me 100 since 2022 that he went into Saturday’s grand finale with no visions of the race-record $75,000 first-place prize dancing in his head.
The fact that Pierce ended up marching forward from the 12th starting spot to capture the crown jewel event for the second time in his career was simply evidence of a generational talent who’s able to overcome all obstacles through ability, desire and savvy.
“Before the start, I said I really don’t feel like we got the set up to win with how the racetrack had been Thursday and Friday,” said Pierce, whose seventh-place run in Thursday’s 45-lap Cowboy Classic was little better than his results on Night 2. “The track kind of came around and helped us out a lot tonight (following overnight showers and thunderstorms), but I still thought we weren't going to win. I mean, I told everyone, I was like, ‘Well, maybe we’ll get a top-five.’
“When do I go into a race saying, ‘Well, maybe we'll get a top five’? I always want to win. I always expect to win. Tonight was definitely unexpected.”
For a driver who so often makes winning races look effortless, Pierce had to scratch and claw to reach the promised land this time. Nothing came easy as he searched all weekend for a combination that would click and unleash the usual speed in his Vic Hill-powered Longhorn Chassis.
Pierce even sought guidance from two former Show-Me 100 winners in an effort to shake his doldrums, including 2020 victor Payton Looney of Republic, Mo., who didn’t have a car ready to compete in the weekend’s action but attended Saturday’s program.
“He just showed up today, and yeah, I hit him up,” Pierce said of Looney, who spent much of Saturday collaborating on setup ideas in the pit area with Pierce. “I hit up Fergie (2022 winner Chris Ferguson of Mount Holly, N.C.), I called him. I just know they won here in the past. They’re good when it's slick. I’ve been … not good this weekend when it was slick.”
Pierce and his crew, led by his father Bob, made constant changes in pursuit of a breakthrough.
“We were all over the board with this car this weekend,” Pierce said. “I really did have basically a different setup every time I went on the track. And that’s not always good when you're chasing. You sometimes get worse. Sometimes you get worse more than you hit on something.”
“Really, I felt like Thursday night was probably my best (preliminary) night, so we kind of went a little more towards back to stuff like that.”
Bob Pierce agreed that his son’s Thursday setup served as the baseline for what he utilized Saturday.
“Believe me, I know I had at least 10 setups on there in all those days here,” Bob said. “I mean, literally, every night we changed something after hot laps, after qualifying, after the heat race. Normally I’ll tweak on it after qualifying and then run the heat race and be OK. Oh, no, no. It was a mess. It was a fire drill all the time.
“So, I guess at the end of the day, if you look back at what tires we had on Thursday night, which is the same tires we had on Friday night and the same tires we run tonight (a hard 4-compound right-rear), we were harder every night than anybody else. And so in a sense, it was messing with me, because how do I know if it's the tires or the car (causing the struggles)?
“But in a sense, it really helped because then I said, look, Thursday we were seventh and we were 10th Friday. The yellows kind of helped on the seventh, but just watching the car move forward, even when he couldn’t pass somebody, at least he was staying with him or would catch him right back if he did lose ground. We wasn’t doing that last night. So I said, ‘OK, let’s do a little tweak on what we did Thursday.’
“Staying on the hard tires all the races probably might have helped,” the elder Pierce continued. “And I knew what I wanted to tweak on, what corner, from that. Just a little load here, a little load there, a little skew on the rearend. And then it was, what are we going to do to the tires to make ‘em last? For a hundred laps, you gotta have something there. You can’t cut (sipe and groove) the hell out of him, you know? So I’m really proud of the (crew) guys there. They did a good on the tires. They were really good.”
The precipitation that doused the speedway late Friday night into Saturday morning helped juice up the surface with more moisture — rain water is “always good” for a track, Pierce said — but even conditions that appealed to Pierce produced issues.
“It was weird because there was portions of the race where I felt different,” Pierce said. “Like at the green flag it wasn’t good. It was slimy (after some pre-feature surface prep), and I was on top of track. About 10 laps in, 15 laps in, I started hitting that bottom really good, and I was kind of able to arc one and two and do some different things than other guys. And then, right before the top came in, when the bottom was slowing down, the top didn’t really show itself yet, and I went through a weird transition where I was struggling. That's when I fell back to fourth, fifth.
“When I was good on the bottom there in the beginning, I was coming up through there and I got to fourth on the bottom, third on the bottom. I was good then, but the track did have some moisture down there. I was able to catch that, chase the brown. Once the bottom got too slick, I was like, ‘OK, I’m probably going to start backing up. Here we go again.’
“But then the other lanes of the track got better than they were again. So it was kind of like a roller coaster. I was kind of like, ‘OK, we’’re good. Maybe we’ll get like a good podium or we’ll see what happens.’ And then it was like, ‘Uh, here we go, backing up.’
“And then the top came in,” he added, “and it was like, ‘All right, Here we go.’ ”
Bob Pierce, signaling his son from outside the backstretch, waited as long as he could to direct Bobby to the outside lane. When he finally did point Bobby up the track just before the race’s halfway point, Bobby ran the cushion to chase down and pass Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., for the lead on lap 69 and stayed there the remainder of the distance aside for when he slid lapped cars.
“I didn’t want him to roll that top too early, even if it was there or not there,” Bob Pierce said. “I didn’t want him to even try it, but I saw Hud (early leader and eventual third-place finisher Hudson O’Neal) and Davenport checking out and they were up there, but I’m like, ‘That will beat your right-rear tire up. We got to stay down here and be cool.’ And plus, it gave him some more laps to run that bottom in case (the preferred line) went down there, because the other night when it did go down there he didn’t drive it right. He was missing the corners.
“So I thought, if nothing else, (staying low) might help him get used to it. And if I do get him up and we gotta go back down, at least I hope he remembers what he did. He was rolling out of the gas good, he was keeping the car straight.
“But then on that one yellow (lap 41), I know (Daulton Wilson) was coming on top, and I thought we need to really move him up. Well, then it wasn't like two, three laps to the next yellow, and here comes the old freight train. I thought, If I don’t move him up now, we’re going to be seventh or worse, and then it might be terrible hard to get by anybody. I don’t care how many slide jobs you do, it ain’t gonna happen.
“So I got him up, and the freight train started,” he continued. “Man, it was wide open (around the cushion). I didn’t think it was going to last up there. I thought for sure it was gonna crown off. Well, it didn’t. I drove my bike across there (after the race), it was pretty hefty.”
The final 56 laps ran caution-free and saw Pierce frenetically negotiating lapped traffic once in command. He resorted to some especially moves to dispose of slower cars down the stretch with Davenport in hot pursuit.
“I never looked up at the video (board between turns three and four) because I didn’t want to break focus,” Pierce said. “I was looking at Bob (signaling) because he was on the backstretch, and his sticks were getting too damn close together sometimes. And I got pretty worried, and I think it was like four or five (laps) to go or whatever, and one of the last lappers I passed, I wasn't quite close enough to them getting into the corner. I didn’t really want to slide them yet, so it was kind of a Hail Mary kind of slider. I knew J.D. was catching me. I was like, ‘Man, I got to get another lapped in between us.’ So I went in there for it.
“You had to really, really haul the mail getting in. I kind of learned that when I went in for a slider on Hudson one time and I kind of thought I was going to clear him. Well, you couldn’t fit a piece of paper between me and him, and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, the next time I do it, I’m going to have to go in a lot faster, a lot harder to make sure I definitely clear hum.
“So it was difficult. Sometimes you go in there that fast across the slick and you’re like, ‘Man, I hope this thing’s going to catch and not go over the cushion.’ But once you got a rhythm going, it was all right. You just had to make sure you were close enough up there.”
Pierce ultimately beat Davenport to the finish line by 2.055 seconds, but the defending Show-Me 100 champion drew precariously close to Pierce several times late in the race.
“I’ll tell you what, man, ‘ol J.D., he might be 41, but he ain’t lost ‘er,” Bob Pierce said of Davenport, who led laps 20-44 and 48-68. “He was up on the freaking wheel. Like me and him talked up there (in victory lane), a lapped car here, a lapped car there, and that could’ve made all the difference. I said, ‘Man, you were not giving up.’ That was pretty impressive. He’s a helluva driver, there’s no doubt about it.”
That also describes Bob’s son, who continued building his legacy with an unlikely victory.
“Man, most weekends where you struggle prelim nights, it’s not good,” Pierce said. “But I haven't been here since 2022, and I haven’t been here in a Longhorn, and so these guys probably do have a little upper hand, more notes to fall back on. So I had to kind of think of that … and this track’s hard to get ahold of, and when it’s really slick, if your car isn’t specifically good for that specific kind of line, there’s not a lot you could do.
“So I just kept thinking, you know, try our best, get a good finish … I knew we weren’t the best here this weekend, so get through this and go the next weekend, go to the Dream the following weekend and see if we can win that and be back on top. I wouldn’t have thought we were going to be on top this weekend.”
After registering his 14th overall triumph of 2025 and pushing his earnings to $309,555 for his wins and over $400,000 total by Memorial Day, Pierce was a beaming driver who praised the speedway for its competitiveness just 24 hours after complaining that it was simply too smooth and slow to be exciting.
“It was an awesome track,” Pierce said. “I know a lot of people say this track, the facility’s great, but of course, does the racetrack hold up to the facility? You know, you got high standards with how nice a facility is. A lot of people don’t necessarily bash the track, they just know it doesn’t really compete with the facility.
“Well, I love that track. Like, once they got some character in it, you kind of had multiple lanes, and you saw the track transition throughout the race. It wasn’t like that when I won (the Show-Me 100) in 2017; it was really rough, really choppy (that year). (Tonight) was just a little character, so that was almost like the happy medium, in my opinion, like what it needed.”
Pierce was the perfect driver to handle the track, which his father obviously understood.
“You know, I’ve said it before, I don’t where he’s gonna plateau,” Bob Pierce said of his son. “When we get in a situation like this, where we're really struggling … I mean, seventh and 10th, that’s struggling when they’re used to getting a third or second or the win. So for him to overcome that, regardless with the weather and how the track was, it’s pretty impressive.
“When I knew he wasn’t driving the track right Thursday and Friday, in the same situations tonight, I only seen him do it wrong maybe four or five times in this race. Going into (turn) three, he was kicking the car out all weekend, and he stopped kicking the car tonight. He was getting away from that tonight, and so, I mean, he’s picked up on it, and that’s what makes him better.
“So, yeah, he’s still getting there,” he added, considering the growth potential Bobby has. “There’s still things that drive me crazy about him, but I keep saying to myself, ‘He’s 28. He ain’t 35.’ ”
