Lernerville Speedway
Hillbilly trip an odyssey for Joiner-JCM operation
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Joseph Joiner's JCM ride at Lernerville. (Jack Reitz)
SARVER, Pa. (Aug. 30) — Joseph Joiner had one thing on his mind after Saturday’s 57th Hillbilly Hundred at Lernerville Speedway.
“I’m going to sleep,” the 31-year-old driver from Milton, Fla., said in his Southern drawl. “I’m going to try to be the last one out of bed tomorrow. I ain’t moving.” | RaceWire
Joiner had a smile on his face and was still cheerily signing autographs and posing for photos with fans in the pit area — the success of his family’s Hunt the Front website makes him one of the most popular racers at any track — but he was fighting fatigue after his quiet 17th-place finish in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event. A whirlwind few days had left him, as well as members of his family team’s crew and the JCM Motorsports operation that he drove for at Lernerville, dragging.
Sleep became a luxury for Joiner and Co. as they battled through a seemingly never-ending series of trials and tribulations with their race car transporters, which made just reaching Lernerville for the second night of the doubleheader weekend a huge ordeal.
The plan for Labor Day weekend was simple enough: Joiner would run Colten Miller’s JCM Motorsports Rocket Chassis at Lernerville, his second appearance with the team since being tapped to replace the departed Spencer Hughes of Meridian, Miss., for Aug. 15-16’s Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway in Locust Grove, Ark. But everything went haywire Thursday afternoon when the time came to leave JCM’s shop outside Birmingham, Ala.
Joiner, accompanied by Hunt the Front crew members Tucker Byrd and Dusty Ladner, arrived at JCM headquarters Wednesday in a pickup truck pulling an open trailer carrying their family’s Capital Race Car that sported a new orange-and-white wrap for sponsor Kubota. They brought their No. 10 machine along because it’s set to be Joseph’s ride for this weekend’s World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.
“We got (to the JCM shop) around noon Wednesday and went to work,” said Joiner, who was followed to Alabama by the Hunt the Front merchandise trailer manned by his brother Jonathan and HTF employee Hunter Jordan. “We had a couple things to finish up on our car before we could load it, and we had to put wraps and stuff on (the JCM No. 19m) car. We basically worked all day Wednesday, stayed Wednesday night, worked, I guess, about all day Thursday, too, and we started loading up Thursday afternoon.
“We got everything loaded up (in the JCM trailer), and when they go crank the truck up, their toter, it sat there idling and just started smoking, just blowing smoke out of it.”
The initial hope — probably against their better judgment — was that the problem was something minor.
“They had just took it down to Love’s (Travel Stop) to get serviced a couple of days before that,” Joiner said. “Everything was obviously fine before that, no problem … we just drove it to Batesville and back, you know? So we go back down to Love’s (Travel Stop) and change the oil again, because apparently they put the wrong oil in it.
“We spent about three hours there waiting in line to get an oil change, and finally got the oil changed there, and it was, I don't know, probably 10, 11 o’clock, Thursday night. Fired it back up, and it was smoking just as bad as it was before. We drove it back to the shop and then it dumped a bunch of oil out of it, too, so everything was covered in oil. We pressure-washed all the oil off of it so we could get a mechanic out there, and actually, a mechanic, like a certified Detroit diesel mechanic, come out about midnight. And he’s basically like, ‘Hey, yeah, you got a busted piston or a broken ring.’ ”
With Lernerville more than 11 hours and nearly 800 miles away and the clock already reading almost 2 a.m. on Friday, “we’re like, ‘All right, we’re not making it Friday night and we know that,’ ” Joiner said. “But what do we got to do to make it Saturday?
“So we called some folks to see if there was anybody around with just a toter truck we could borrow. Nothing really panned out there, so we were like, ‘OK, our rig’s sitting down there in Florida. It’s definitely not ready to go, but it can go, you know what I mean? We can work on this and that and get it ready to go.”
Joiner said he initially readied to leave immediately with Byrd in a pickup to make an overnight drive back to the Hunt the Front shop to retrieve the family toterhome and trailer. But Jonathan suggested that they instead check with their older brother Joshua, who directs the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series, and father and see if they could bring the rig to them.
“We were like, ‘You know, that sounds like a better idea,’” Joiner said. “So, we talk to them. Joshua’s like, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ He was going to drop off his kids at 8 in the morning (Friday) and go to the shop and call us then.”
Joshua FaceTimed with Joseph shortly after 8 a.m. to make sure the Hunt the Front trailer was properly stocked. More problems, however, cropped up on Joshua’s end.
“He’s loading up things and taking stuff out of it, organizing this and that,” Joiner said. “Well, we get everything in there and they had to open the (liftgate of the trailer). So when he goes to close the back door and, I don’t know what he done or how he done it, but the trough thing (across the top) that holds the door from falling back down, somehow or another, he got the door wedged in there. He goes looking into that piece that’s across the top — you can see it’s all rusty now, because they stripped everything off of it — and he had somehow got the door under it and picked up on it and it broke all the welds off of it and pitched it straight up in the air.
“So at that point, it was basically, I was like, I don't know what to tell you,” he added. “Like, I’ll just go home. I don’t know. This is too much.”
The story wasn’t over though. Joiner trip to the Keystone State wasn’t yet done.
“This is like 9:30 probably, 10 o’clock in the morning, and so my dad’s there at our shop,” Joiner said. “He’s like, ‘I’ll me call my brother. He’s probably got an excavator here close and we can push down on (on the top of the trailer) with that hoe, and we’ll call somebody to come weld it.’ I’m like, ‘OK. I guess it’s already broke. What’s the worst that could happen?’
“I guess they got some little mini excavator up there and pushed down on it, got somebody over to weld it back on, and honestly, it’s better than what it was. But they didn’t leave from down there until about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and that’s a four-hour drive (to Birmingham), so they got to the JCM shop about 7:30 or 8 (Friday evening).”
Joiner, his crew and the JCM team immediately began moving everything from the JCM trailer to the Hunt the Front trailer. The easiest fix would have been to simply hook Joiner’s toterhome to the JCM trailer, but that was impossible because the hitches on the two weren't compatible.
“We finally got loaded up and I think it was like 9, 10 o’clock or so when I finally hit the road (Friday) night,” Joiner said. “We got here around 12:30 (p.m. on Saturday).”
There was some comic relief amid the grueling overnight haul to Lernerville.
“It’s funny,” Joiner said with a smile. “I drove to start. We left a little after 9 and I drove until 7 o'clock this morning. I was three hours and 45 minutes from the track, and Tucker's riding with me and I’m like, ‘You’re up. You can finish it from here.’
“So I go to lay down on the couch. It’s like 8 o’clock in the morning, we were at a truck stop, we got fuel and everything. We start going down the road again (with Byrd driving) and when I finally wake up I look and he’s laying on the couch beside me. The truck’s running, and I’m like, ‘Well, we must be here and like pulled up to the gate and it’s locked or something and they ain't letting us in.’ So I go look out the front and no, we’re at a damn rest area. I’m like, ‘What the hell?’
“I look on my phone and we’re two hours and nine minutes away (from Lernerville). I’m like, this joker drove for an hour-and-a-half, that’s it, and he’s already taking a nap!”
But Joiner and his boys finally unloaded at Lernerville, a day late and down many hours of sleep. Was it all worth it? Well, they certainly sold plenty of merchandise, but Joiner’s results weren’t especially noteworthy.
In fact, after Joiner finished second in a heat to earn the fifth starting spot for the 100-lap feature, he ran into trouble before the green flag was even displayed. His JCM car spun 360 degrees at the top of the frontstretch during the pace laps.
“I gassed on it, and I guess by the time I gassed on it, they all let off in front of me,” Joiner said. “The three-wheel brake was on there, and so I hit the brakes and it just turned me left. I about run into (Devin) Moran.”
Shortly thereafter, on the opening lap of the finale, Joiner went sideways in turn four and collected Garrett Alberson and Daniel Hilsabeck. He continued but spun between turns three and four running ninth on lap 18 and ultimately completed 93 circuits.
“Early in the night we obviously were OK, and we could maintain and we were decent,” Joiner said. “But there in the feature, once any bit of traction on the racetrack kind of went away, I just couldn’t make any speed. No good at all. And so it sucks, because that kind of racing surface is what I really like to drive on, but we weren’t any good tonight. I guess that's just part of racing and we’ll try to be better next time.”
That next attempt, however, would have to wait until Thursday and the start of Eldora’s World 100. Racing somewhere Sunday was out of the question.
“We would have. We were considering it,” Joiner said when asked about competing on Sunday. “Not now. Everybody’s too tired.”
