Brownstown Bullring
Moyer keeps rolling amid team, health challenges
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt.com managing editor
Billy Moyer ready for battle. (Tyler Carr)
BROWNSTOWN, Ill. (June 10) — No matter what else is going on, Billy Moyer has a tendency to focus on the task at hand — making his race car go fast.
The 67-year-old Hall of Famer did just that Tuesday night at the Brownstown Bullring, capturing the DIRTcar Summer Nationals opener, outdueling Mike Harrison in a back-and-forth battle that turned back the clock on the circuit he’s competed on for nearly 40 seasons. | RaceWire
The Hall of Fame driver doesn't get caught up about age, about his battle with Shannon Babb for supremacy as winningest series driver. He doesn’t sweat whispers from other drivers that his extended career has stained his legacy. Amid an October heart attack, and a near-disaster last month when the team’s trailer detached from the hauler at highway speeds, Moyer still does what Moyer has always done best — find speed.
“It’s just one night, one win,” Moyer said standing in front of his car over the droning engines of other divisions. “But it feels like a race car again.”
Moyer’s victory on a tough-to-pass track where the fastest cars were ringing the high side was mostly a result of a pair of turn-four miscues — the leading Moyer got hung up exiting turn four to let Harrison past, and the pole-starting Harrison repeated the error five laps later to hand the point back — than Moyer clearly having the fastest car. But he was glad that he and longtime crew chief Steve Norris made the right calls on his Keith Lawson Motorsports Longhorn Chassis.
“It felt so good in the heat races and everything. You know these things are so temperamental nowadays making adjustments on them and I didn’t wanna leave it alone just sitting with my pants down,” said Moyer, who fought failing brakes in the final laps. “I didn't wanna overadjust and screw myself up, so I really had a lot of thinking to do there. We made the right decisions and done the right thing and so it makes me feel good.”
The obvious storyline is that Moyer’s 101st victory puts him back into a tie with his former protege Babb, 51, atop the all-time victory list on the grueling Hell Tour founded by Bob Memmer in the mid-1980s.
"How about that?” Moyer’s former crew member Randall Edwards said with a laugh after watching the feature with his Carson Brown Motorsports team. “Poor Shannon is going to have to race until he’s 60!”
Babb, the four-time series champ whose 101st victory came at the same track on June 30, 2022, was a bit prickly about the questions that inevitably come when either driver extends their long-running duel.
“You know what it means? Absolutely not a damn thing,” said Babb, who felt like he’d have won if he’d drawn the front row. “It means we just keep getting sucked into it.”
Moyer knows Father Time will have more say about the final record than anyone else.
“I’ve been asked that question the last year or two and he’ll end up beating me out, I would say, because he’s younger than I am,” said Moyer, a six-time Summer Nationals champ. “I’ve said it before, but it's so much work, not only in the race car, but just the preparation of this stuff. It’s a young man's game. It's too much work for the reward you get anymore. That’s the way to put it.”
Moyer has long talked of scaling back or retiring, sometimes more publicly than others. He more of less dissolved his own team several years ago, but he’s often revived by a latest connection to a car owner willing to help him go fast again, including Illinois driver Tim Lance, fellow Iowa native Todd Cooney and most recently fellow Arkansans Keith and Elia Lawson, who Moyer thanked in victory lane at Brownstown. (The Lawsons often go to Moyer’s events, but they were attending the funeral of Keith’s father.)
Moyer calls his season of one victory and six top-five finishes among 13 starts a “crappy year,” but it’s not bad by most standards. He’s leading the Comp Cams Super Dirt Series points but doubts he’ll continue on that Arkansas-based tour.
The team was reeling after the scary mid-May highway incident when they were returning to Arkansas after an eighth-place Comp Cams finish at Revolution Park in Monroe, La. Navigating the Little Rock bypass on I-440, Moyer was behind the wheel of the hauler in the wee hours when the tongue connecting the race-car trailer broke off.
“It’s a miracle nobody got killed,” Moyer said, who sensed the disconnection, looked in his rear-view mirror and briefly attempted to get in front of the trailer to block it and slow it down. Even Moyer’s skills couldn’t pull that off. Instead, the trailer veered off into a median and down an embankment, fortunately avoiding the worst of potential obstacles.
“It totaled out everything. It ruined the four-wheeler, the pit cart, and all our stuff inside, so we've been completely rebuilding again,” Moyer said. “So we've been working, these guys working for me and myself, (partner) Carla (Rayburn), I mean we've been, like, a lot of 12-hour days. Just we had to reorganize this trailer, get all our parts put back in here.”
Moyer, who borrowed his old trailer from Lance for his Summer Nationals trip, knew the team was fortunate overall.
“The toter went to the right luckily instead of going into the oncoming traffic,” Moyer said. “Luckily, traffic was light. It was a terrible deal, but it could have been so much worse. I mean, it went down through the median, it went down and just missed a big tree. If it had hit all them trees down through there, who knows what would've happened, but it hit a dirt embankment. And right past that up a little ways there's a bridge embankment. So if it hit that …”
Moyer’s voice trailed off. The team phoned for help and had wreckers come to assist.
“It stayed on the wheels. When we pulled it out of there, it took two big wreckers to get it out of there and we thought it was gonna roll over because it went down an embankment,” Moyer said. “That’s why they had used two of them, with one trying to keep it so it wouldn't roll over as (the other) was just dragging it back up the hill.”
“It was about a five-hour ordeal getting it pulled back out of the ditch and then taking it down to this truck salvage yard thing where they had to keep it overnight.”
While much of the trailer’s contents sustained damage, the race car was banged around a bit, “but it didn't hurt nothing serious,” Moyer said.
While the hauler wreck has been this season’s major obstacle, Moyer faced a more personal challenge after he concluded 2024’s 33-race season when he experienced what he termed “pretty serious” health issues.
Moyer was in his native Iowa just before the October funeral of his uncle Carl Moyer, whose Ankeny-based Karl Chevrolet has been a longtime sponsor of his nephew along with other drivers, teams and series.
“I went up to Iowa to go to his funeral and I went a week early to see family and everything. About four days before his funeral, I had a heart attack,” Moyer said. “I hadn’t been feeling right. I knew something was wrong. But the symptoms I was having, it was across my shoulders and my back and everything. I didn't think it's heart-related, but it was.
“I just got to where I finally went to the ER, they put me back there and start doing some tests and the one nurse come in there and was sending me home. She told me everything checked out (and) that I was OK. I come up out of the bed and had to get after her, I said, ‘Lady, I'm not here because my thumbnail hurts. I got something wrong there.’ ”
Another nurse reviewed his case and “the next day they take me into the hospital there, and when the doctor got in there, I mean my widowmaker was 100 percent blocked, he said. So they said my heart had built another artery around the blockage. I’d never really ever heard of that. Anyway, they put two stents in and I've been on the recovery ever since then.”
He began his 2025 racing season in late February, but he’s on guard about his health.
“I’ve been trying to keep in decent shape and watch what I eat and Carla helps me with all that. She’s a nut on healthy food and stuff, so she's really good for me on that. Just trying to exercise and trying to get fit — and hang on to these,” he said, gesturing toward the nose of the night’s winning car. “They're not easy to drive.”
Moyer, 10 years older than the next oldest Summer Nationals winner (Jim Curry of Norman, Ind., was 57 when he won the last of seven series victories in 2000 at Spoon River Speedway in Banner, Ill.), isn’t just holding on to the steering wheel these days.
“The way these cars are built nowadays, it’s a lot different than the old days,” Moyer said. “I mean, the harder you run ‘em, the better they work. They’re made to run in the corner wide open and throw it in there. It’s way different from the old days of (Dale) McDowell and (Jimmy) Owens, some of us old guys that come up racing, it’s just a different world today. You just gotta adjust to it.”
Don’t ask Moyer about retirement, but as he’s done for the last 10 years or so, the topic always comes up, even if he’s not asked.
“I’ve said it before, but I don't know how much more I can go on,” Moyer said. “I’m going to make it to the end of the year, but I’m not coming back next year. I love working on them. I'd love to have a driver and be crew chief and keep my same team, just get somebody else in the seat. We’ll see what happens. Maybe we'll do that, but it's just a lot of work.”
Until then, he’ll be on the Summer Nationals during the Illinois stretch at Kankakee, Peoria … and who knows how long. Just not all 31 series races.
“I think I've got too many birthdays to run them all,” Moyer said with a smile.
