Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Florida teen's parents guide from afar
The DIRTcar Summer Nationals has sort of been like going off to college for Trey Mills, the 17-year-old Dirt Late Model prospect from St. Augustine, Fla., who is spending a month on the road in the Midwest obtaining an education in his craft.
But it’s also been very much the same for Mills’s parents Stanton and Amanda. They aren’t accompanying their boy on his grand odyssey because they’ve had to stay home to run their business, Mills Concrete, so it’s like they dropped their son off at his dorm room — well, in this case sent him off in the team’s toterhome that’s crisscrossing the map to visit racetracks — kissed him goodbye and advised him to work hard as he learns to become independent.
“We haven’t seen Trey since Eldora,” Amanda Mills said earlier this week from the Mills Concrete office, referring to the June 4-7 Dream XXXI event that she attended with her husband to witness Trey’s second attempt at the famed half-mile oval in Rossburg, Ohio. “Then (the team) left (to embark on the Summer Nationals) and we came back home to work and we haven’t seen them since face-to-face.”
Mr. and Mrs. Mills haven’t been empty-nesters for the past month — they also have a 14-year-old daughter, Kyndal — but it’s been an adjustment not having Trey around.
“That’s part of the experience here that we’re all having to get used to,” Stanton Mills said. “We’re used to seeing him every day, going to the races with him. I may have missed a weekend (of Trey’s racing) here or there, but we’ve never been away from him this long, I mean, where all you do is talk to them.”
The situation left the Millses in the strange position of watching from afar on June 26 when Trey pulled off a seismic breakthrough victory, nipping national star Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., by a hair at the finish line to capture the Herald & Review 100 at Macon (Ill.) Speedway for his first career triumph on the Summer Nationals. It was, in fact, the first time ever that Stanton wasn’t there in person when Trey won a race, going back over a decade from Trey’s gokart days to his successes in Crate Late Models and his first Super Late Model checkered flag in a June 2023 Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series feature at Whynot Motorsports Park in Meridian, Miss.
Stanton didn’t get to hug his son in victory lane after the $7,500 triumph at the fifth-mile Mighty Macon. Instead, he experienced the moment standing in the parking lot of a Mellow Mushroom pizza restaurant in Florida.
“I actually went out to dinner (that night) with the guy that owns the car that Trey won with (Twin’s Farm owner Brandon Catto), a guy whose son and Trey grew up racing go-karts together and another buddy of ours,” Stanton said. “When we got through (eating) they were closing up, so we went in the parking lot and put the phone on the hood of my truck and we all sat there and watched Trey” on the DIRTVision stream.
“When he took the lead, they’re jumping up and down. I’ve been through this enough to know that we’ve led and I got excited and it was premature, and, you know, you don’t really never know what’s going to go on, so I just sat there and sat there and sat there. When he crossed the finish line, I really didn’t have it all taken in yet, and they’re jumping up and down and high-fiving. They’re like, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you moving?’ I’m like, ‘I’m still trying to get all this together.’ ”
Stanton eventually joined in the celebration, which must have been quite a sight to anyone nearby.
“I’m sure we looked like a bunch of crazy school kids out there bouncing around,” Stanton said with a laugh. “I told them, ‘Whoever was watching this had to think, Man, what’s going on?’ ”
Amanda, meanwhile, was cheering Trey on from the other end of the Sunshine State. She was on a long-planned vacation to Marathon in the Florida Keys with her daughter and a large group of friends that Stanton had to bypass because of work commitments.
“We were in our condo and we were playing board games because it was like, I don't know, 10:30 at night, and I was like, ‘I gotta take a minute, y’all. I got to pause here because my son’s leading this race right now,’ ” Amanda said. “So we were all around the kitchen table watching it in, screaming, crying, all that good stuff.”
Amanda noted that the friends she was with “know that Trey races, but they don’t know, like, the life of it. So I’m like, ‘This is a huge deal.’ ”
It certainly was. After finishing no better than 10th in the first 12 events of his first full Summer Nationals assault, Trey rose up to win the tour’s longest race on its shortest track and become, at 17 years and one month, the second-youngest victor in Hell Tour history behind only Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., who was 16 years, seven months old when he won his first Summer Nationals feature in 2013 at Lincoln (Ill.) Speedway.
Stanton had to wait a bit to get Trey on the phone after the win.
“He said when he got back in the pits, there were so many people around the car and other drivers and teams and everybody coming over there, he didn’t call me right away,” Stanton said. “It was about an hour after he won that he called me, and he just kind of was talking to me about the win and how excited he was. He was like, ‘Man, I knew my car was good, but I didn’t realize I was going to be able to do that.’ And he said, ‘I thought I lost it when I got into protect mode and Sheppard passed me, he slid me, I knew I made mistake.’
“That’s why in his interview there (after the race), he was talking 90 mph. And if you know him, his voice was kind of cracking. I said, ‘You were talking so fast, you forgot all your sponsors.’ He goes, ‘Dad, I had no idea what I was doing there. I just won the race. I was trying to figure it all out.’ ”
Stanton was of course disappointed that he wasn’t there in central Illinois, but he looked at his absence in a pragmatic manner.
“That’s kind of cool actually, because it’s a point in life where I know he’s going to move on, I know I can’t be there all the time,” Stanton said. “We’re trying to handle the financial aspect of (Trey’s racing), so we’re doing what we’re having to do and he’s doing what he’s having to do, and we’re proud of him.
“It just let you know a little bit faster that he’s growing up.”
Indeed, Trey is now 11 years into a racing career that he hopes will become his livelihood and stretch long into the future. He started wheeling around tracks at the age of 6 in a gokart.
“I raced, and when I was racing, he always was around,” said Stanton, who competed in the mini-stock, street stock and 604 Crate Late Model divisions. “He’d sit in the car, we’d take pictures. He was always at a racetrack.”
After a friend whose son was already running a gokart suggested to Stanton that Trey get into the sport, Trey expressed interest and soon was so enamored with racing that he decided to stop playing baseball.
“That was the point that I sold all my stuff,” Stanton said. “Actually, Mike Spencer of Bozard Ford bought all my race cars, trailers, everything, and I got out and went gokart racing with Trey. And the rest is history. We've been racing every weekend since then.”
Trey’s first Dirt Late Model opportunity came six years ago courtesy of James Simons of Albany, Ga., a veteran racer who at the time was fielding a car driven by Floridian Jason Fitzgerald. Stanton spent a short time driving one of Simons’s cars alongside Fitzgerald “and we were all sitting there one night and (Simons) said, ‘I got a car at the shop. We ought to put Trey in it.’
Considering Trey was only 11, Stanton said he told Simons, “Uh, yeah, that’d be cool,” but he “didn’t think nothing about it.”
“I let it go, and two weeks later, he called me and said, ‘I was being serious about that car,’ ” Stanton continued. “So it was like three weeks before Christmas, and it was a 602 (Crate), and I went and got the car. We come back, put a body on it, wrapped it for (Trey), and we gave it to him for Christmas. He had no clue what was going on.”
After getting a custom-built seat to put in the car (Trey was “like 60 pounds,” Amanda said, and the seat “looked like a baby seat”), Stanton took Trey to All-Tech Raceway in Ellisville, Fla., for his first laps.
“Nobody would let him race (at that age), and (All-Tech promoter) Wendell (Durrance) said, ‘If you bring him here and he can show me that he’s not going to be a hazard, I’ll let him race,’ ” Stanton said. “Well, we took him there and practiced with him for one night and Wendell said, ‘You can bring him back and race and he’ll be fine.’ So Wendell actually helped us get him started in Late Models. And then the fourth race he ran, we went to Volusia (Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla.) for his very first time at Volusia and he won the race, and then from that point on, he’s been hooked.”
Stanton soon started up a family-owned team and Trey began flashing potential, winning the 2020 All-Tech 604 Crate Late Model championship as well as a Bristol Dirt Nationals preliminary feature at the dirt-covered Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway that same year. He dived into Super Late Model racing in 2023 and won a Hunt the Front feature en route to earning the fledgling tour’s Rookie of the Year honors, then finished sixth in last year’s HTF points standings.
Trey ran two stretches of last year’s Summer Nationals, including the final four races in Michigan and Ohio during which he rang up three top-five and four top-10 finishes topped by a runner-up placing to Tyler Erb of New Waverly, Texas, in the points finale at Wayne County Speedway in Orrville, Ohio. The experience encouraged Stanton and Amanda to have Trey tackle the entire Hell Tour schedule this season especially with the added assistance provided by Catto, who bought a Longhorn Chassis that Trey debuted during Georgia-Florida Speedweeks.
The Summer Nationals seemed to be the perfect forum for Trey to not only pick up an immense amount of seat time in a short period while figuring out another vital item about making a living in the sport.
“If you want to do it,” Amanda succinctly said.
Both Amanda and Stanton said that putting Trey into the grueling meat-grinder of the Summer Nationals provides the real-world training he needs to figure out his future. They’ve tried to lead him along as a teenage driver the best way they can.
“We just kind of keep him grounded,” Stanton said, noting that Trey attended public school until switching to online courses last year as his traveling with racing increased (he’ll continue online learning for his upcoming senior year of high school). “He’s had to maintain a certain great point average (in school); if you remember, at Speedweeks last year, he didn’t race because of it, so we held him to a standard.
“We’re trying to keep him somewhat structured where he’s got accountability. He’s doing a good job at that. All of his work has to be done before he races — it has to be done before we leave for racing that weekend. He has to mow the grass — he’s got 5 acres to mow. And he has to be at the shop every Monday to help them guys wash because that’s the dirtiest part of the job.
“He’s got a pretty regimented schedule. We’re trying to teach him that there’s a lot involved in (racing) even though it's fun, and if it’s something that he wants to do that it’s a lot of work. And that’s the hardest part, really, is teaching him how much work it takes to do it.”
Trey is coming to understand that intimately while racing every night on the Summer Nationals. He’s on the road with his crew chief Colton Blair, who has been with the team for five years, and crew member Robbie Hartley.
“I can just tell a difference from them being out there,” Stanton said. “They started out really good, and then they went through like a little lull and they were getting their butts kicked, and then all of a sudden they come back a little bit and they won that race and now they’re back, they’re revived and refreshed and ready to keep on rocking. They’re going to finish it all way to the end. They’re good spirits still, so it’s been very, very, very good deal for him.”
“And that's really what we wanted him to do, to get the experience,” Amanda added. “Because if this is what he wants to do for his career, we’re like, ‘Well, you need to start now, and you need to go out there and do the Hell Tour,’ especially just looking at the people that have done it and have come such a long way from when they started it.”
Amanda, 45, said Trey has “always pretty much known this is what he wants to do, so we’re behind him 100 percent.” She calls him her “old soul” due to his maturity and “very calm demeanor,” and she remarked that “our goal is just to get him as far as we can get him so he can get a full-time ride.”
That time is approaching.
“Trey’s known from for about three years now what our plan was as a family,” Stanton said. “We basically told him this year and next year would be the two years that we’re going to run hard as we can run, and then after that, he’s got to make a decision. I told him we’ll still race, but we got to slow down, because me and Amanda, we pour concrete, we don’t have a concrete plant or nothing, so I said, ‘Look, at some point, me and your mom got to start saving for retirement. Like we love you, and we’ll give you everything we have as long as we can do it, but at that point we’ll have to step back and not race as much.’
“So that would be the time when we have the conversation of, ‘Hey, you know, did you get good enough to get you a ride? Or are we just going to do this for fun for right now? Are you going to go to college?’ If it's up to him, he wants a ride, but we both know that it’s not like they’re lined up everywhere looking for drivers right now. So we’re going to see how things go the next couple years.”
Nights like last week at Macon offer the possibilities of a dazzling future for Trey. Stanton is hopeful that the on-the-job training his son is getting will pay off.
“The first couple of days (of the Summer Nationals), it was, you know, I wanted to call and check in,” said Stanton, who plans to fly out to meet the team this weekend and spend the last week of the Hell Tour with them. “Last year I called them all the time and they were actually getting aggravated with me. But this year, I said, ‘All right, I’m going to do a little better job and kind of sit back and let them do their thing.’
“The first couple days, you’re missing it, and you want to be a part of it, and you’re nervous, and you’re like, ‘Are they going to be doing this? Are they going to be doing that?’ And then as times went on, I’ve kind of progressed and been able to kind of chill, like, ‘All right, these guys got this. I don't have to be micromanaging. They’re good at what they do.’ And that makes me feel good, that they’re figuring it out.”
Ten things worth mentioning
1. There was a bit of irony in the fact that Trey Mills held off Brandon Sheppard for his Summer Nationals victory at Macon. “It’s funny because Robbie (Hartley), the tire guy who’s there with Trey, he said that Brandon Sheppard's son (11-year-old Jase) has been hanging out with Trey the whole time, in his rig, in his trailer,” Amanda Mills said, referring to last week’s Summer Nationals stretch that saw Sheppard in action. “Sheppard’s been coming over going, ‘Where’s my son at? Where are you at?’ And he’s in Trey’s trailer. He’s with Trey.”
2. After the July 13 Summer Nationals finale, Trey Mills and his crew will return to Florida. But they’re planning to head right back to the Midwest less than two weeks later to compete in the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway. “We love that track,” Stanton Mills said. “Just as a family, that’s a good experience. Like last year was our first year there, and to pull up there, and when you get to the last house, the gate to the track is right there … you can’t explain that to people. That race right there as a family and a fan and enjoyment factor, that ranks up there at the top, you know, because we don’t ever get that. There’s so many people there that love racing, that want to chat. You meet a lot of people. Last year we met tons of people we’re still in contact with today. That area is very, very passionate about their racing.”
3. Tuesday’s DIRTcar Summer Nationals stop at Benton (Mo.) Speedway brought an unexpected sight: Billy Moyer Jr. of Batesville, Ark., who made his first Dirt Late Model start since clinching his lone Comp Cams Super Dirt Series championship on Oct. 21, 2023, at Super Bee Speedway in Chatham, La. Driving his Hall of Fame father Billy’s Keith Lawson-owned Longhorn Chassis — with the elder Moyer sitting out the night to serve as Junior’s crew chief — he started strong with a heat race victory and led the 30-lap feature’s first 11 laps off the pole but faded to a 14th-place finish largely because of comfort issues with his seat. “I haven’t sat in that car or any car in two years, and when the track was slower I never had to turn the car much on entry so I felt great,” Moyer wrote in response to a text I sent him. “But when they watered the top (for the feature) I needed to somewhat back it in the corner and my right hand, arm, shoulder and leg all hit each other when I really had to counter-steer so I couldn’t run the top. I have bruises on both arms from the seat, shoulder support and belts — I’m taller and bigger than my dad. I didn’t want to wreck their car so I just had to be careful.”
4. Billy Moyer Jr. has been happily living a non-racing life since leaving the sport’s grind behind — he’s a junior high school teacher and basketball coach — but he remarked on Tuesday’s DIRTVision broadcast after his heat win that he was excited to be back behind the wheel. “I just wanted my son and daughter and everybody to see me race,” Moyer said of his two young children he’s raising with his wife Skyla. “I didn’t think I’d ever do this again.”
5. While the 37-year-old Moyer has no current plans for more starts, he thoroughly enjoyed the chance to be a helmet-carrying driver racing a car his father had prepared. “I had a ton of fun and racing with my dad was awesome,” he related. “I’ve never not had to make every decision throughout a race night.”
6. Did you happen to see the photo that recently appeared on Ashton Winger’s Facebook page? It was a shot of tour regulars Winger and Cody Overton laying on the stomachs on the Norman County Speedway racing surface before the start of last Saturday’s series World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series stop at the track in Ada, Minn. What made it notable was the fact that both racers stripped down and were wearing only their underwear and socks. Winger’s comment with his post: “Rain delays are better with my boy Cody Overton and a little Real American Beer.” (They had a can of the series sponsor sitting between them.)
7. The Winger-Overton photo certainly drew plenty of Facebook comments. One commenter included a short video they took from the stands of what looked like the two drivers in the act of posing in front of a photographer. Observers must have been wondering in the photo shoot was going to be part of a WoO Late Model Series swimsuit calendar.
8. Second-year WoO regular Tristan Chamberlain of Richmond, Ind., celebrated his 18th birthday Wednesday, which prompted his parents to offer an aside in a Facebook post. “Tristan’s officially a legal adult today!” the comment read. “Mom and Dad no longer have to sign a minor release form for him to be in the pits.”
9. Lucas Oil Series points leader Ricky Thornton Jr. spent the midweek racing a midget in the #BC39 event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s dirt track, where he made a superb charge from 17th to finish sixth in Wednesday’s finale to earn Rookie of the Race honors. I checked in with RTJ after his first night of action on Tuesday to ask if he thought the track, which sits inside the IMS’s third turn and is listed as a quarter-mile in size, could handle a Dirt Late Model event. He wasn’t so sure. “The problem is it’s not wide enough for a Late Model I don’t think,” he responded. “The shape makes it to narrow. Tight corners, then the straights are round.”
10. Condolences to Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway Dirt Late Model regular Hayes Mattern, his wife Shianne and their entire family in the wake of the couple’s 9-month-old daughter, Kynlee, passing away on June 28. Kynlee was born with Symptomatic Neurocutaneous Melanosis with Hydrocephalus, a rare, congenital condition characterized by the presence of both large or multiple congenital melanocytic birthmarks on the skin and melanocytic tumors in the brain and spinal cord. She underwent numerous medical treatments throughout her short life until her condition worsened related to an inoperable, pre-cancerous brain tumor that was found earlier this year and she was hospitalized on June 11. Kynlee passed away with her parents by her side at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.
