DirtonDirt exclusive
Drivers dust out cobwebs for Hell Tour memories
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt managing editor
(Todd Turner photos)
For long-traveling drivers who have truly experienced the unique series that is the DIRTcar Summer Nationals, their earliest races amid the day-after-day grind aren’t always seared into their long-term memories. Sometimes, they have to be pried out, like DirtonDirt did with several series veterans during the first week of this year’s Summer Nationals.
The results are priceless, at least for die-hard fans of the Bob Memmer-founded circuit who have chased dirt racers around Illinois and a dozen neighboring (and not-so-neighboring) states for nearly 40 years.
• Brian Shirley recalling his initial series victory at Peoria (Ill.) Speedway despite losing his car’s nosepiece in the closing laps.
• Kevin Weaver’s memories of lapping a NASCAR driver and outrunning multiple Hall of Famers en route to winning in Farmington, Mo., his first tour triumph.
• And Dennis Erb Jr. remembering his father asking when he planned to return home during his first trek on the grueling series. The younger Erb’s reply? "Whenever we run out of money.”
On the long-running circuit where vagabond racers have gone from race-to-race virtually every night, memories are a blur of sweaty firesuits, bent sheetmetal, bickering crew members and race-car haulers limping down the highway to the next dirt track.
"It’s all I’ve ever known,” said 32-year-old Tanner English of Benton, Ky., digging for memories that began as a teen crewing for his father Terry, and later as a winning series racer in his own right.
Shannon Babb of Moweaqua, Ill., has had countless Summer Nationals highlights amid four tour championships and 101 victories, a mark that’s tied with Billy Moyer as the most in series history. But he was able to dig through the cobwebs to remember his first top-five run as a 22-year-old in the tour’s opener at Vermilion County Speedway in Danville, Ill., driving Terry Conrad’s car.
“One night we did run real good and I drove a guy's car. It was a No. 10. It was a GRT car and we ran third at Danville. It was the first time I ran a (Hoosier LM) 40 (tire.),” said the 51-year-old Babb, who recalled the spring rates on each corner of his car. "I'll tell you the setup: I was 450 left front, 650 right front, a pair of 225s and left-rear clamp bracket.
“That had to have been like in '96, I believe. I run pretty good with him over there. I remember I don't know who won, but I know (Rick) Aukland was second because I was behind him. I ran third, so I was pumped about that.”
Don O’Neal won the race followed by Aukland and Babb, whose first series victory would come nearly three years later in the tour’s opener at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway. But the Danville memory remains.
"I was excited about it,” Babb said on the opening week of this year’s tour. “Those guys were a big deal at the time because they were just winning races, so to be able to stay on the same straightaway as those guys, it was doing something.”
Another four-time champion, Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., won’t forget his first-ever Summer Nationals victory. He’s reminded of it whenever he looks at the wall of his race shop, where a damaged piece of his car’s nosepiece is attached with an inscription: “Summer Nats First Win Peoria Speedway.”
The would-be trophy is from the second event in 2004 at Peoria (Ill.) Speedway when Shirley won a race where eventual tour champion Don O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., led most of the way. Rough conditions knocked the nose off Shirley’s car late in the race, but he was able to hang on for the victory. His victory on this year’s tour at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway marked the 43rd of his career.
In his first victory at Peoria, rugged conditions “knocked the whole nose off,” the 44-year-old Shirley recalls of the $6,000 victory that was then the richest of his career. “We kept the piece because back then they really wasn't giving checks a lot on the Summer Nationals — back then they didn't give them at all, I don't think — so we found that piece of nose and kept it on the wall.”
Randy Korte of Highland, Ill., is now 62 years old and follows the circuit to assist customers as a racing consultant, but the Hall of Fame driver’s series legacy is solid with 13 victories and a runner-up Summer Nationals points finish in 2009. His earliest recollections of the tour are fuzzy, but someone jogged his memory of his first tour victory in Mount Vernon, Ill., in 1997.
"I watched it on video a couple years ago,” he said. “Somebody had it on tape and sent it to me, and I'm like, 'Oh, that's cool.’ I hardly remember that. I don't, I'm not good at remembering stuff. I'm not. I couldn't tell you half the (stuff) that I've done or whatever.”
It was a worthy victory for Korte, who outran Tony Izzo Jr., Billy Drake, Rick Aukland and Doug McCammon for a $5,000 payday at a track that was then called K&L Raceway.
For Jason Feger of Bloomington, Ill., one of his earliest Summer Nationals memories was from the 2005 season, his second year in the Super Late Model division. The 2010 tour champion — and a two-time winner so far in 2025 — remembers an unforgettable edition of the Herald & Review 100 at Macon (Ill.) Speedway where nine of the top 10 drivers in series points loaded up and left the track because the rain-soaked surface was so difficult to navigate. The fans showed their displeasure.
“The earliest memory of craziness was the Macon rain race. When they're like throwing beer cans at the haulers and freaking out and we still raced,” the 47-year-old Feger said with a laugh. “I stayed and raced. I shouldn't have.”
The Macon fans “were irate when the haulers started leaving. They were throwing beer cans at the top of the (haulers),” Feger recalled of the race won by Joe Ross Jr. "I mean, I stayed and raced, but I remember like, we ended up getting wrecked by like a lapped car that spun out in front of me and took the nose off. But there was still water kind of coming under the walls (while) we're racing in the feature. That one was definitely a crazy one.
“It stands out because I flipped the night before at Spoon River hot-lapping, and we went home and put the car together and we had like three different panels on it, and then we got lucky it rained (at Macon), because otherwise we would never have made it. I remember, I swear we're pitted in (6 inches of) water. By the time we got there, there was nowhere good to pit. So yeah, that was definitely a crazy two days.”
Pete Parker of Kaukauna, Wis., who this year attended several early events supporting his son Paul, was among the tour’s earliest champions in 1988. But his championship was nearly accidental as the Summer Nationals hadn’t exactly reached the zeitgeist.
"We didn't even know about it,” the 76-year-old Parker said recently, remembering the '88 tour opener at the Steele County Fairgrounds in Owatonna, Minn., for the Gopher State 50. “We were standing around afterwards drinking some beer and then (Jim) Curry, and I forgot who else, and they said, ‘Oh, come on down.’ We took off and it was, I don't know, it must have been 500 miles and about 90 degrees.
"And I think (Larry) Phillips was probably part of that first deal. We got down there and then I didn't never run on some of them little tracks and we went to Macon for the first time and it was quite an experience.
“I think I was about a top-five car in most of them. And then Memmer gave me the check for $1,000 — that was my Summer Nationals championship deal.”
Kevin Weaver of Gibson City, Ill., is unofficially among a handful of drivers with the most career Summer Nationals starts. He’s won 17 series races and captured the 2000 championship during the season when the tour ran its most consecutive daily events — 21 in a row at 21 tracks.
Weaver doesn’t remember much about his first victory on the circuit from July 16, 1991, at St. Francois Speedway in Farmington, Mo., but he does remember a discussion a few weeks later with then-NASCAR star Ken Schrader, who entered occasional Summer Nationals events that season in his Budweiser-sponsored Dirt Late Model.
“I remember the racetrack, kind of a hooked-up little joint there. I hadn't been there but a handful of times, maybe a couple of times is all,” said Weaver, who outran Freddy Smith and Scott Bloomquist among others.
“Kenny, I think we come up (to Illinois) after that, and Kenny Schrader says, ‘I got something for you.’ I said, ‘What?’ I didn't really know Kenny real well — still don’t — but he comes up to me and hands me a picture, and it was a picture of (Schrader’s) red No. 25 car and a picture of me and we were side-by-side.
“And I said, ‘That's pretty cool.’ He says, ‘Yeah,’ he says, 'I wish I could say that I was ahead of you,' but he says, 'You was actually lapping my ass right there.' ”
The recollection draws a smile from Weaver in the pits at Kankakee, Ill., during this year’s circuit.
Dennis Erb Jr. of Carpentersville, Ill., captured 2007-09 championships on the Summer Nationals trail, boosting him to a national touring career that has included a World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series championship.
His like-named father was a regular on Illinois dirt tracks in the 1990s, but the younger Erb hadn’t competed at many far-flung tracks until making his first Summer Nationals trek in 1996.
"I remember going out on my own with a friend of mine (Dan Bubash) and myself and we went and ran like a whole week of it,” Erb said. “Like, I think we ran around Kankakee, Spoon River, did them, La Salle, then we went off into Iowa and you know just did a whole week up there, went up to Owatonna. That’s when we just started getting out and doing a little bit of traveling. Like I said, me and (Bubash), he was just helping me at that time, I think we came home from Spoon River one night and my dad's like — I think he’d hurt his motor or something — and he's like, ‘Where are you guys going?’ I was like, ‘Well, we’re going Summer Nationals racing.’ And he said, ‘When are you coming back?’ ‘I don’t know — whenever we run out of money.’
"So we took a whole week or so and did all that. I mean, back in the day it was fun, a learning curve, running up and down the road and racing with Moyer and (John) Gill and all those guys coming up through here, and (Bob) Pierce and all that, just going out on the road trying to get our feet wet a little bit back then. But yeah, it helped out a lot and then coming back home and, you know, getting more experience. Just running these things every summer helped make me a better driver and (learn a) maintenance program, keeping your cars up so you can go race each night. It was a lot of fun back then, but it also taught me a lot.“
