Knoxville Raceway
A $75,000 rebound for the ages at Knoxville
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Hudson O'Neal in victory lane. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
KNOXVILLE, Iowa (Sept. 20) — Two forgettable preliminary programs — one downright awful, one just bad — sent Hudson O’Neal into Saturday’s Lucas Oil Knoxville Late Model Nationals finale with little momentum. But one thing he didn’t lack was a positive attitude. | RaceWire
As rough as O’Neal’s first two outings were at Knoxville Raceway with a car-destroying flip on Thursday and a loose oil line dive-bombing his Friday, he wasn’t fretting over his fortunes. Some wise words by phone from his Hall of Fame father, Don, helped keep the 25-year-old star from Martinsville, Ind., in the right frame of mind.
“He made sure I was all right (after the crash), but he didn’t have a ton to say until probably after last night,” said O’Neal, who joked that his father didn’t make the trip to Iowa because “he has a little radius around his house and he don’t travel much past it.” “He just gave me some nice words and just said, ‘You're all right. You have a good race car. Just trust the process. Whenever you have bad nights, you just got to get up the next day and forget about them.’
“And that’s so true,” he continued. “That was the story of this weekend. It was just bad night after bad night, and then we were able to come back and have a good one.”
Saturday, of course, was more than just “good” for O’Neal and his SSI Motorsports team. It was spectacular, a comeback for the ages that ended with O’Neal winning the 75-lap Knoxville Nationals feature and its record $75,000 top prize in blowout fashion from the 15th starting spot.
Just 48 hours after O’Neal climbed out of his steaming, demolished mess of a race car following a wild flip into the turn-two steel guardrail — thankfully without any serious injury — during Thursday’s rain-shortened preliminary feature, he emerged from his backup Longhorn Chassis in victory lane amid a shower of confetti.
O’Neal became the youngster victor in the event’s history and joined Don O’Neal, who captured the race in 2011, as the first father-son duo to win it. He also proved that he has the mental fortitude to push forward following a frightening accident that was in fact the first time he rolled over in his nearly decade-old Dirt Late Model career.
How did O’Neal so quickly put the wreck behind him at the high-speed half-mile oval? He remarked that a race car driver can’t dwell on such setbacks, no matter how violent they may be.
“My flip wasn’t really like I went in there and blew a tire or traction-flipped or something,” O’Neal said. “Me and another driver (a sliding Daulton Wilson of Fayetteville, N.C.) made contact, and I think that probably added a little bit of … I didn’t think too much about it the next time because I knew it was nothing that really I did. It was just kind of circumstances, so I wasn't scared to run off in that corner wide open the next time because I knew there was no car there, you know what I mean? So that was probably a lot of it.”
O’Neal’s crew chief Jason Durham, a 52-year-old Dirt Late Model veteran in his first year working with O’Neal, knew when Saturday’s green flag that the accident was already in O’Neal’s rear-view mirror.
“Well, I can honestly say this with good reason — I didn’t worry about,” said Durham, who previously won the Knoxville Nationals as a crew chief for Jared Landers of Batesville, Ark. (2015) and Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga. (2022). “I mean, obviously, I never want to see anyone flip, but I have seen it hurt people (mentally) in the past. Like, it just takes it out of them. Some people take it different than others, but I wasn’t overly concerned about it with Hud.
“He said his knee was a little sore (after the crash), but today, he was like, ‘Man, I feel great.’ ”
Durham paused for a moment. Then he went on to analyze O’Neal’s post-victory condition.
“He’s tired now, though,” Durham said with a smile. “He said, ‘Man, it’s hard to run that bottom that many laps.’ ”
The inside line — an extreme inside line, as low as a driver could go at Knoxville — was the route O’Neal took to the checkered flag. Once he mastered the rough-and-tumble but very fast path around the track, he turned a race that featured eight lead changes among three drivers over the first 57 laps into a rout. He seized command from Devin Moran on the 57th circuit after swapping the position once with the Dresden, Ohio, driver and went on to defeat Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., by a monstrous 8.386 seconds.
“I’ll be honest with you, I think I found it last night,” O’Neal said of Friday’s discovery of the low lane. “Whenever I went to the back (after pitting to reconnect a loose oil line) and I was having to maneuver through traffic to try and get back up through there, I found that berm like along the extreme inside. It wasn’t as good last night as it was tonight, but I thought that I was able to make good laps down there even as top dominant as it was last night, so I knew if the racetrack was a little bit different circumstances and there was a little bit of traction leaving the corner that it was a good possibility I was going to be able to have success down there.
“I just had to be patient with the racetrack and it come around. And then, you know, about halfway it started to it to get a little bit slower out there (around the top), and them guys were running really hard using their tires up, and I just tried to stay patient and keep everything up underneath of me.”
O’Neal found himself sitting in fifth place when a caution flag flew on lap 44. He exploded along the inside lane on the restart, blasting by Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., Thornton and Davenport in a two-lap span and quickly catching Moran. After another caution on lap 53, O’Neal exchanged the lead with Moran on laps 55-56 and then took over for good on lap 57, setting sail never to be threatened over the remaining uninterrupted action.
“It’s not very often you get a good enough race car or find the right line to be able to drive by them like that,” O’Neal said.
The drivers whom O’Neal vanquished couldn’t duplicate O’Neal’s line, which saw O’Neal zip around the track while glued to the inside like a slot car.
“He runs his stuff really free compared to like, what I do. Just different driving styles,” said Thornton, the 2023 Knoxville Nationals winner who reached second place with a lap-71 pass of Moran. “And and honestly, like, anytime we go somewhere where it’s really technical around the bottom, like on a berm or something like that, like, for some reason, he’s really, really hard to outrun. I go to back to whenever he won the Pittsburger a couple years ago, he was the only one running below the berm and free enough to do it.
“This (berm), you could get almost your whole car on it and I was too tight to do that.”
Moran, who finished third after leading four times for 21 laps, had no answer for O’Neal’s low-side assault.
“Hud was just really, really good at the end,” Moran said. “I just got too tight, and then when I was racing Hud for the lead, I was just going so hard to try to keep him behind me and just got my stuff too hot. It killed me there, but that's just the way it goes sometimes.
“Early in the race, I was really good around that bottom, as you could see me when me and J.D. were racing for the lead — J.D. was on top and I was on the bottom. Just towards that end of that race, it just started like chunking out a little bit, and I just could not circle that bottom. I just got too tight when it was like that.
“I knew when (O’Neal) went around me down there, I knew how good his car was, and I knew we were going to be in trouble unless something happened to him,” he added. “And that’s what I told myself — just keep on racing in case something does happen and try to stay up there.”
Sheppard, who crossed the finish line just inches behind Moran for a fourth-place finish, offered an analysis of how O’Neal managed to perform so well around the inside.
“I was in the bottom a lot in that race, but he could hook that bottom just right,” Sheppard said. “There was a big berm, but there was a rut you had to hit — both ends had ruts off the corners (actually drainage ditches) — so if you wanted to hit it right, you had to get your left-front on (the berm), get your right-rear in the rut, and then floor it. It looked like he could hit it about every lap, where I’d miss it one out of three laps. He could maintain it and leave the corner.”
It was no easy task for O’Neal, though. He tested his car to its fullest extent as he negotiated the inside, noticeably bouncing hard each time he exited a corner.
“I told them, ‘Man, I felt like I was really hard on this race car,’ because I was bouncing and on the chip,” O’Neal said. “It was tough on a race car. It was rough-and-tumble down there, especially when you hit that drainage ditch … you’d get to hopping and stuff. And there was a couple times I had to get way out of the gas because I got to hopping, and when you hop and wheel spin, that’s how you break driveshafts, so I would just get out of the gas and roll out and let to settle down and take back off.
“You had to be committed, there was no doubt about it. You had to be careful. One wrong move and you break a driveshaft and your night’s over.”
Durham viewed O’Neal’s approach as the right one for the 75-lapper.
“You get, like, J.D., Devin, Ricky, all of them guys pretty much committed to the top,” Durham said. “Well, it takes a while to slow down and go to that bottom and figure out how to run that. Hudson was right the opposite. We wasn’t quite as good on the top, but he’d done maintained and learned how to get a rhythm in that bottom.
“He knows that, if you can run the bottom, you don’t abuse your tires as much. Because it’s brown down there, and you’re not wheel-spinning that top and you don’t slip the tires. But you have to be very disciplined to run that because if you miss it by two foot, it’s like you lose a second instantly.”
O’Neal never made a major misstep en route to his 11th overall victory of the season and his second crown jewel after July 19’s Silver Dollar Nationals at Huset’s Speedway in Brandon, S.D., which also paid $75,000-to-win. It was the fifth crown jewel triumph of his still-young career, joining victories in the World 100 in 2023 and the Show-Me 100 and Topless 100 in ’21.
“And that’s at 25 years old,” Durham said of O’Neal’s growing list of crown jewels. “He has a a very long, bright career because he’s still got so many years ahead of him. I mean, easily, he can race 20 years and just be 45.”
The victory left O’Neal shaking his head in amazement over his success.
“It’s so cool,” O’Neal said while standing in the postrace inspection area after it had emptied of his car, Thornton’s and Moran’s. “You can’t take it for granted. These races are so hard to win anymore, and the competition is so tough. And after the last month we’ve had, we really, really needed this one, especially right here before this (Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series) championship round, to kind of just catapult us with some good speed going into next week.
“You go back to the end of July and the beginning of August, and we were one of the best cars in the country, and then the whole month of August and, you know, the beginning of September here, we haven’t had the balance and I haven’t been comfortable behind the wheel. To be able to find that a little bit is so great.”
Durham stood proud of his driver and his crew, all of whom stepped up following Thursday’s vicious wreck. And with O’Neal joining Thornton, Davenport and Moran in the five-race chase for the $250,000 Lucas Oil Series title that begins with Sept. 26-27’s Jackson 100 at O’Neal’s home track, Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway, there is no time for rest.
After losing the car the Todd Burns-owned team was planning to make their primary vehicle for the tour’s chase events, they need to hastily assemble another machine for the stretch run.
“We stripped most of the body (off the crashed car) and we got it to roll in (the trailer), but everything on it’s broke,” said Durham, whose team plans to run Wednesday’s FloRacing Night in America presented by Kubota event at Tri-State Speedway in Haubstadt, Ind. “It’s not good rolling, either. The motor might be sitting on the floor time by the time we get home. We'll keep the motor and probably some of the ignition stuff and oil system and all that, but there ain’t much good on it.
“So when we get home, we gotta get to work. We got one (chassis) that’s about 40, 50 percent done, so we got two days, three days to build another one before Haubstadt. First (chase) points race coming up and here we are with one car, but we’ll get it ready.
“I tell these guys — you know, we gotta take the bad with the good,” he added. “We can’t get down, just keep working. And you know, it’s no secret, but we got one hell of a race car driver and he don’t get down either, so we just keep digging.”
