Eldora Speedway
Notes: Madden falls short again in World 100
By Kevin Kovac and Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt
Chris Madden (44) runs second early at Eldora. Zach Yost()
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 6) — Another crown jewel at Eldora Speedway. Another disappointment for Chris Madden.
There were signs Saturday that karma might finally shine on Madden in his 17th World 100 feature appearance and 43rd overall crown jewel start at the famed half-mile oval, but ultimately it was the same old sad story for the accomplished 50-year-old from Gray Court, S.C. He ran in second place for laps 3-39 but didn’t have the juice to climb higher before a late-race scrape left him with a 13th-place finish. | Complete World 100 coverage
As badly as Madden craves a major victory at Eldora, though, his latest loss didn’t send him heartbroken over an opportunity missed. He remarked afterward that his Kale Green-owned Longhorn Chassis was solid but not a winning car, especially once Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., turned up the wick following a lap-39 restart to snatch second from him, overtake Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., for the lead two circuits later and control the remainder of the distance for the $72,000 top prize.
Madden started third after a heat win and paced in second behind Davenport for much of the race’s first half. He even nosed underneath Davenport through turns one and two on lap 38 — raising the possibility that he was ready to make a move — but that was best, and last, gasp.
“I guess Ricky just got better,” Madden said while leaning on the counter in his team’s trailer shortly after the race’s conclusion. “We got too tight. On that (lap-39) restart, I couldn’t turn down here (in turns one and two) and we went from second to fourth.”
Madden’s final summation: “We had a top-five race going, for sure. We wasn’t going to win it.”
Discussing the reason his top-five bid ended is what brought an emotional response from him — some clear agitation, if not anger. He had some fire in his eyes as he recalled the feature’s 89th lap and contact he had with Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C.
Running fifth one circuit after a lap-88 restart, Madden entered turn one with Hoffman underneath him. The cars came together at the extreme inside of the corner, causing Madden to pull up lame with left-front damage for a caution flag while Hoffman sped away and went on to finish third despite damage to the right-front bodywork of his Tye Twarog-owned Longhorn.
Madden pulled no punches with his analysis of the incident.
“That last restart we had right there, we just got run over by Nick Hoffman,” said Madden, who pitted and returned to salvage a lead-lap finish of 13th worth $6,500. “He’s just a complete idiot every time I race with that guy. He just tore the whole left front off of it. He’s nowhere near making the pass. He just runs you over. He’s not good enough to race by you.
“We definitely got off (the lead pace) there at the end, but we weren’t bad enough to be run over like that. The guy’s got no respect for nobody. I mean, that guy’s got one coming, I can tell you that. You can print it, you can mark it, you can do whatever you want. He’s got one coming.”
Hoffman, 33, brushed off Madden’s comment when asked about the contact following his participation in the postrace press conference for the top-three finishers.
“It just got to the point where he held me up kind of a lot of the race and got me in bad spots and stuff, and I was tired of racing with him and I got underneath him,” said Hoffman, who recorded a career-best finish in his sixth World 100 feature start. “He should see me all the way down the front straightaway. I’m planning on sliding him in one, and he had me pinned against the inside wall. So it was either hit the infield wall or hit him, and was a lot easier to just hit him.
“That’s what killed my right-front fender. The fender was pretty much junk again at the end from just running into him, but like, I had to go, you know? He held me up a couple times and had me in bad air, and it’s like he races me harder than anybody else I feel like that gets around him, so I was frustrated with him anyway, and it was like, ‘I gotta go.’” — Kevin Kovac
Ferguson regains Eldora footing
Running sixth approaching Saturday's halfway mark, 26th-starting Chris Ferguson surely thought he’d have his first World 100 top-five since 2021. Lap 44, those pursuits weren’t so straightforward.
“My crank trigger went bad down the frontstretch. So when the crank trigger goes bad, I reached over to switch to the distributor with my left hand. And I completely missed the bottom,” Ferguson said. “I lost four spots right there. … The motor started completely shutting off. When I did that, got it switched, but by the time I grabbed the steering wheel, I drove in too deep behind (Brandon) Sheppard, and I slid.
“When I slid, that let (Cory) Hedgecock, Dennis Erb, and I can’t remember who else … it was four cars back by me.”
The Mount Holly, N.C., driver tumbled down the leaderboard to 10th, a setback that gnawed at him postrace because he could only regain two of those lost positions. Despite that being “one of the times my car was better than I finished,” Ferguson found consolation in his eighth-place result.
“We’ll take it. I got to sixth, just hurt the edges of my tires not trying to get lapped at the beginning, starting on the second-to-last row there,” Ferguson said. “I really went hard trying to get by a lot of cars because I knew that dirty air was going to hurt a lot.
“I knew, probably when I passed (19th-starting) Dale (McDowell) early in the race, I’m probably going a little too hard, but I’ll be honest with you, it’s hard to back down because I was running the top.”
Ferguson ended up tying Bobby Pierce, who started 27th and finished ninth, for World 100 hard-charger honors. If anything, that’s extra motivation for Ferguson to squeeze in more races in 2026.
“Oh, 100 percent. My business, it’s my No. 1 priority. I have people that depend on me,” said Ferguson, whose business Victory Seats celebrated its first anniversary debuting at last year’s World 100. “I say we’re in a lot better shape now than where we were a year ago. I have great employees that allow me to go race. When you get the right people in the right place, it allows me to go race. I haven’t been able to race like I wanted to … people think I don’t wanna race or I choose not to.
“I have to take care (of the business). But now we have the right people in the right places. I want to race more. I feel like I have a great car.”
Ferguson’s like McDowell in a way: No matter how often or how well he’s raced, Eldora puts him in the right frame of mind. With five top-fives and nine top-10s in 16 Eldora major event feature starts, Ferguson still believes he’s an Eldora contender that, if all goes right, can win a major event.
“I still feel that, yeah. I feel, in June, I started sixth, got to second by lap 30 or 40. That was our third race on the (Stinger Race Car). We were struggling by the end of it. We’re opposite this time,” Ferguson said. “I do feel like I can get back into rhythm myself and we can make a few more changes, get this thing right, I feel like I can contend at these big ones again. I enjoy that part of racing the most.” — Kyle McFadden
Quiet night for Pierce
Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., was smiling for photos with a long line of fans still visiting him well after the World 100 ended, but underneath the friendly demeanor he was boiling. He couldn’t wave away a frustrating performance that saw him start 27th and never seriously contend en route to a ninth-place finish
“We come here to try to win, and I’m not happy with a ninth place,” said Pierce, who last year won the World 100 for the second time in his career. “I wouldn’t be happy with a third place or a second. I wanna win.”
Back-to-back victories in Dirt Late Model racing’s most prestigious race was never really on the table for Pierce. He ran well in the weekend’s preliminaries with 25-lap semifeature finishes of third on Thursday and second on Friday, but he never got rolling in the finale. In fact, after a seventh-place finish in his heat, he had to make a late-race move in the first B-main just to secure the fourth and final transfer spot — without the pass he would have been watching the 100-lapper from the pits because the two points provisionals were already taken — and he didn’t crack the top 10 in the feature lap 89.
“We got started way behind the 8-ball,” Pierce said. “Had a bad draw, I guess you call it, with the (heat) invert, starting fifth in that first heat, and the car wasn’t good so we finished seventh in the heat race, couldn’t go anywhere. Luckily we made it to the B-main and scratched and clawed our way to get through there (to qualify), then the feature rolled around and the racetrack was … it was there, just not quite enough up there (at the top) to really make the big gains.
“So I got up to sixth or seventh at one point and fell back to ninth at the very end (losing two spots over the final three laps). We’ll take it, move on, and maybe get better the next time. We gotta get a better start in our heat race.”
Pierce, 28, did start the World 100 finale for the 12th time in his 13 attempts since 2013, a statistic he called “pretty cool.” The only time he was absent from the feature in his career was in 2021 when he was suspended from competing in the first of the year’s double World 100s because a crew member’s altercation with a track official during the overnight hours between the preliminary and main-event programs.
The World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series points leader offered his congratulations to race winner Ricky Thornton Jr., who impressed Pierce with his run to victory.
“That was kind of surprising because, you know, J.D. (Jonathan Davenport) and (Dale) McDowell were up there at times and he still won it,” Pierce said. — Kevin Kovac
Schlenk’s painful weekend
Rusty Schlenk sort of reluctantly decided to end his six-year absence from World 100 competition, entering the action after feeling pretty good about his 12th-place run in a Baltes Classic semifeature on Sunday. Eldora’s major events have never been high on the budget-conscious driver’s to-do list, but he thought he’d take a shot at the big show for the first time since 2019.
By the end of the weekend, the 39-year-old from McClure, Ohio, was wishing he had just stayed home.
After falling three spots shy of cracking semifeature fields on Thursday and Friday, Schlenk’s fortunes became even worse during Saturday’s sixth heat. On lap five he was swept up in a devastating five-car accident between turns one and two that battered both his body and self-designed Domination Race Car.
The incident began when Jordan Koehler and Jason Riggs came together and slid up across the track. First Tyler Millwood was collected and then Rusty Ballenger crashed into the mess, clipping Koehler and Riggs with his car’s rear end. Finally, Schlenk smashed into the pile at high speed with the right side of his machine and nearly pushed Millwood’s car over Koehler’s.
Damage was heavy among all the cars involved — Ballenger’s Warrior house car looked especially mangled after virtually all its rear bodywork was torn asunder — but the five drivers were able to climb from their cockpits. Schlenk, however, complained of multiple painful spots and was taken to the infield care center for further evaluation by the Eldora safety team.
Schlenk wasn't transported to a local hospital, but on Monday he told DirtonDirt he suffered a broken bone in his foot, bruised ribs and strained neck muscles from the extremely hard hit that he said left his car and engine “junk.”
The Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series points leader, Schlenk said the injuries won't keep him out of action: “I’ll figure out how to drive.” — Kevin Kovac
Odds and ends
The sixth-place finish Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., recorded in the Rocket Chassis house car matched his career-best in the World 100 (he also was sixth in 2021’s second World 100). A Dream winner in 2019, the 32-year-old is still searching for his first top-five finish in 12 career World 100 feature starts. … Garrett Alberson of Las Cruces, N.M., retired on lap 41 with a broken left-front shock mount sustained in a backstretch collision with Bobby Pierce. … Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky., was the race’s first retiree, pulling off on lap 11 with substantial damage to his car’s rear deck for a short outing in his fourth consecutive World 100 feature appearance. … Drake Troutman of Hyndman, Pa., said he “totally missed the setup” in his first World 100 finale start, but 18th-place finish earned him a $3,000 bonus as the Shane Unger Memorial Rookie of the Race. … Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., had his Briggs Transport car with its tribute wrap to his late father Barefoot Bob McCreadie up to eighth after a lap-37 pit stop to change a right-rear tire when smoke on lap 88 signaled terminal mechanical woes. … Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., looked like a contender when he marched from the seventh starting spot to third by lap eight, but he fell from the spot on the 22nd circuit and just kept going in the wrong direction. The former World 100 winner was eighth when he pitted his Longhorn Factory Team car on lap 37 for a tire change that didn’t improve his performance, prompting him to retire on 70 while running 19th for a 23rd-place finish. … Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., who won the World 100 in 2023, started 25th after qualifying through a B-main and never climbed higher than 22nd before retiring on lap 54 because his “car just never felt right.” He was already lapped when he retired in 25th. … Four chassis brands were represented among the top five: Two Longhorns (winner Ricky Thornton Jr. and third-place Nick Hoffman), a Team Zero (runner-up Dale McDowell), a Rocket (fourth-place Tyler Erb) and an Infinity (fifth-place Ryan Gustin).
