Eldora Speedway
Faltering tire dooms Davenport's World run
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Jonathan Davenport's crew replaces a flat tire. (Zach Yost)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 6) — For much of Saturday’s 55th annual World 100 at Eldora Speedway, Jonathan Davenport was forced to improvise behind the wheel of his Double L Motorsports machine.
During the lap-38 caution period, having led every lap and in position for a record-tying sixth globe trophy, the 41-year-old Blairsville, Ga., driver noticed something wasn’t quite right when he swerved back and forth to put some heat in his tires. | Complete World 100 coverage
“After that caution came out, I thought (my right-rear) was a little soft when I was down there weaving my tires trying to clean them up,” Davenport said. “Then we took off and couldn’t go down the front straightaway at all. I knew (the right-rear tire) was really low at that time. I was just hanging on and hoping it didn’t blow out and then tear the deck up, things like that.”
Davenport endured the tire’s slow leak another 50-plus laps until it went entirely flat on the lap-89 restart. While eventual race winner Ricky Thornton Jr. dialed up the pressure when powering into the race lead on lap 42, Davenport never regained full speed until he bolted on a fresh right-rear tire in the infield pits with 10 laps remaining.
Davenport surged from the tail to finish seventh, but his hopes of tying Billy Moyer’s six-World 100 victory total were dashed.
“It was definitely going down. It had a slow leak in it because I got really oddly tight getting in and it started chattering the right-front, and I couldn’t use the gas pedal down the straightaway at all,” Davenport said. “It just got worse and worse and worse as we went there. And then obviously, we were still going. I could see on the tire, it didn’t really blister, but I could tell where it’d been running low for a while.
“Anyway, we was really good the first of the race. Very maneuverable. And then came in and changed tires, and they said we was almost a second faster than the leaders there. If it happened with 20 to go, then maybe we could’ve got back and had a shot. Yeah, it just ain’t our time, you know what I mean? It’s all right. We still have a really fast race car.”
While Davenport has led 109 laps over the last three World 100s without a victory, he didn’t seem as frustrated as you might think. In fact, Davenport says he “got lucky” in winning Friday’s 25-lap semifeature because one of his tires went flat sometime between crossing the checkers and arriving to the postrace tech area.
“We had a flat. It was all the way to the rim once we got to tech after victory lane there,” said Davenport, who also won a Thursday semifeature. “We escaped one last night, but it got us tonight. That’s the way it goes.”
In Saturday’s finale, Davenport wished his tire hadn’t endured so long, because “if we had a caution earlier, maybe it would’ve went down then” and he could’ve rallied back in time to mix it up with Thornton, runner-up Dale McDowell and third-place finisher Nick Hoffman.
“All kinds of what ifs,” Davenport said. “Luckily, I think I got a few more years left in me, get a couple more shots at it.”
Examining his flat right-rear tire after the race outside his pit area, Davenport was convinced the only plausible explanation for the flat was that he ran over something.
“I knew I wasn’t hurting the tire wheel-spinning or whatever,” Davenport said. “I was very careful in the first (portion) of the race to not slip or anything. It’s just the way it goes.”
Earlier in the race, before the lap-38 restart, Davenport started sensing that something wasn’t quite right when racing the lapped car of Max Blair.
“If you notice, I caught Blair and a couple other ones, but Blair drove back away from me there,” Davenport said. “Yeah, just one of those things, I tried to nurse it on in. I should’ve just came in at that point knowing something was wrong, then I would’ve had plenty of time to try and get back to the front. Hindsight’s 20-20.”
From the lap-38 restart until the right-rear tire went completely flat on lap 89, Davenport had to abandon his hallmark middle groove because his car couldn’t maneuver as sharply with the softer, deflating right-rear tire.
Staying within two seconds of Thornton until lap 82, Davenport didn’t let the Chandler, Ariz., superstar drive away easily. But he also couldn’t mount any sort of comeback with the groove he ended up running and having to improvise with.
“Yeah, I was way too tight. I couldn’t get down the straightaway at all because I’d lose all my momentum,” Davenport said. “I just ran up in the banking more. I didn’t run all the way around the top until the very end. Yeah, so, that’s the way it goes. I had to maneuver around where my car felt the best.”
During Saturday's postrace press conference, Thornton said he hopes the brand-new Longhorn Chassis he brought to Eldora can become his designated race machine at the legendary half-mile. It’s a page out of Davenport’s masterful playbook at Eldora, the racetrack where he’s won 26 times, most of them aboard the same race car he affectionately calls “Eldora” since the 2021 World 100.
When Davenport learned that Thornton’s Koehler Motorsports No. 20rt team intended to consecrate their newfound car that’s 2-for-4 in Eldora features over seven days, he responded with, “sure, why wouldn’t they copy something we do?”
“We’ve been so good here. Yeah, just, we race so much, if you brought a new car here for (June’s) Dream, by the time you get back to (September’s) World, if you run it the rest of the year, you have 40 races on it at that point,” Davenport said. “And if you come back to the Dream again, it probably has 80 races on it. It’s really hard to bring the same car here time after time. Luckily I have a great car owner that allows me to have an extra car sitting here just for this place.”
Every year at the Eldora, Davenport hints that he won’t race at the Tony Stewart-owned track forever. He’s said several times that he likely won’t race into his 50s, meaning that every Eldora crown jewel he earns in his 40s is all the more meaningful. Not that anyone had been worried, but Davenport quipped that “I’m not ready to retire yet,” adding that “we’ll just have to see” how many more starts he makes it Eldora.
“As long as we’re competitive, as long as I have a car owner that allows me to race when I want to, not have to race all the time, I’ll still race for quite a few years,” Davenport said. “I’ll have a few more ice cream seasons and come back a few more times.”
