Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway
J.D. puts frustrations behind in PPMS repeat
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Jonathan Davenport dominates at PPMS. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
IMPERIAL, Pa. (Oct. 4) — The Pittsburgher 100 weekend couldn’t come quick enough for Jonathan Davenport. Not with the foul mood he was plunged into following an utterly forgettable start to the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series’s Big River Steel Chase for the Championship one week ago. | RaceWire
Two rough outings Sept. 26-27 at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway — lowlighted by contact-induced spins in the quarter-mile oval’s C.J. Rayburn Memorial and Jackson 100 — had the 41-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga., itching to get to Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway.
Davenport wasn’t about to deny that it had been, well, a very long week.
“Yeah,” he said. “Oh, hell yeah. I was frustrated all week, really, so it was good to get back here, get back in the car.”
And win, of course. Davenport rebounded from arguably his most disappointing weekend of the 2025 season — of any season, really — with a downright dominating performance, leading Saturday night’s 70-lap Pittsburgher 100 finale virtually unchallenged from flag-to-flag for a psyche-soothing $50,000 victory that marked his second straight success in the Monster Half-Mile’s marquee event.
Standing alongside his winning Double L Motorsports Longhorn Chassis after parking it near the Lucas Oil Series operations trailer in the pit area for postrace inspection, Davenport had the look of a driver who was perhaps more relieved and satisfied than purely happy. The nightmarish trip to Brownstown hit him hard, making an immediate positive response necessary for a racer of his elite caliber.
Davenport entered Brownstown’s twinbill to kick off the Lucas Oil tour’s four-driver, five-race Chase with plenty of confidence. He was second in the reset standings, trailing Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., by 70 points after the application of bonus points for series victories, and ready to pursue his fourth career Lucas Oil Series title.
Alas, nothing went right for Davenport. He managed only a 14th-place finish in the 50-lap C.J. Rayburn Memorial after a flat tire knocked him from the lead on lap nine and a subsequent tangle sent him spinning, and he had to rally from the rear for a sixth-place result in the Jackson 100 following a lap-44 spin induced by contact with fellow championship contender Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, while battling for second.
“We had plenty of luck,” Davenport deadpanned of his Brownstown effort, “but it was just all bad for sure.”
Davenport found himself saddled with a 160-point deficit to the Jackson 100-winning Thornton, effectively putting his title hopes on life support. He was distraught over his fate and left the track afterward without comment, jumping in a car with fellow racer Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., to head to the Indianapolis airport for their early-morning flights home.
While Davenport’s Cory Fosvedt-led crew pointed the team’s hauler back to its home base in Batesville, Ark., Davenport returned to his ranch in Pelzer, S.C., to spend the week clearing his mind around his wife Rachel, son Blane and all his cattle.
“These guys probably wouldn’t have liked me if they’d have had to been around me all week,” Davenport said of his crew.
But as much as getting away from the race team allowed Davenport to reset mentally, he acknowledged that it was impossible to completely push aside such a difficult weekend.
“I try not to be in too bad a mood at home,” Davenport said. “I try not to bring that home because I ain’t there much, so I try to stay positive and definitely in a good mood around my family. But, you know, it does get you down. This is what we do for a living and I’ve been doing it a long time. You just try to take the bad with the good, but it ain’t easy.”
The Pittsburgher 100 sitting next up on the schedule was certainly a positive for Davenport. He could look forward to tackling PPMS, a track he not only likes but conquered one year ago with his first-ever victory in the event coming in convincing wire-to-wire fashion.
“Brownstown basically killed our whole (Lucas Oil) year,” Davenport said, noting that the stumbles meant he would need Thornton and Moran to experience misfortune for him to have a chance at the championship. “But I try not to get too excited, and then I try not to get too down. Because I mean, I've been doing this s— long enough. I know it's going to be up and down, and it’s like, I knew we could come here and I knew we had a good notebook for here and I like this place and we had a really good race car, so I knew we could definitely turn it around here.”
Davenport’s Pittsburgher 100 weekend didn’t start to his liking with a relatively quiet fifth-place finish in Friday’s 30-lap preliminary feature, but it made him and his Lance Landers-owned team push harder to be right for Saturday’s headliner.
“I didn’t like much last night, but here, a little bit goes a long way, and I just couldn’t steer like I needed to last night,” Davenport said. “We just put our heads together and tried to come up with a little bit different combination. We done some stuff to steer better because I really didn’t want to take the back of the car out of the racetrack and free it up and stuff like that. We just went to work and somehow magically we figured it out.
“That just shows that we can figure out problems and my guys really listen to me, all the complaints that I have all the time. They don’t ever complain when I complain to them. I definitely got to think them.”
Starting third in the 70-lapper after a heat win, Davenport was on the assault as soon as the race commenced. He shot by front-row starters Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., and Moran on the opening lap to assume command and never looked back.
“I actually probably could have slid the front row in (turns) one and two, but I wasn’t going to do that to Brandon,” Davenport said. “And actually, I thought he would have come back by me (on the backstretch), but I never seen him, and then, the 99 (Moran), you know, come back by me, but then I had a pretty good run and there was just a little bit of room there so, yeah, I seen the opportunity to go ahead and get by him early.
“From then, you know, clean air here is definitely huge, but we had a great car.”
Davenport was behind the wheel of a machine that he debuted in Aug. 29-30’s Hillbilly Hundred at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa. He won last year’s Pittsburgher 100 finale driving the car he’s reserved for duty at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, since 2021 — he surprised everyone with his decision to run it at PPMS — but he didn’t consider doing that again.
“We had a shot to win (Lernerville) with this, and then we took it to Bull's Gap (Tennessee’s Volunteer Speedway) and we won there (a $20,018 FloRacing Night in America show on Sept. 11) and then I ran it at Brownstown,” Davenport said. “We kind of built this car for the Chase, and I wanted to run it a few times before just so we’d have fresh equipment. It’s been in contention to win every night except last night, so really, really pleased with this car.”
The vehicle had Davenport feeling perfectly comfortable at PPMS.
“I like the bigger, high-speed places that get really slick,” Davenport said when asked about the sprawling track. “This place is really technical. Like, if you slip, you can lose a whole lot. It’s easy to lose a lot, but it’s hard to gain a lot. I was going through lapped cars there and I’d kind of get stalled out behind a couple of them so I’d have to kind of change what I was doing a little bit or they would move up in my line and just kill the air just a little bit, so it keeps you guessing here for sure.”
“But there’s room to move around. You’re not really held up by other cars. I mean, you are to a certain extent just because of air, but you got plenty of room to move around here to try to figure out a way to pass somebody.”
Davenport navigated a long-distance race in which he was never seriously threatened by a rival. Max Blair of Centerville, Pa., crossed the finish line in second place a relatively close 0.623 of a second behind, but Davenport’s edge, which at points reached over a straightaway, wasn’t in jeopardy.
While Davenport’s 115-point deficit to Moran, who took the lead in the Lucas Oil standings by 15 points over Thornton, leaves him mathematically alive for the title in Oct. 17-18’s season-ending Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora, he realizes he’ll need major help to overcome the gap. He’s now entirely focused on closing the circuit’s campaign with a $100,000 victory in the one crown jewel race he hasn’t yet captured.
Davenport will head to Eldora feeling good as well thanks to his Pittsburgher triumph. There will be no miserable week spent waiting for the next race, though the veteran understands that he needs to keep an even keel even after his fourth victory of ’25 worth at least $50,000.
As evident as it is that a frustrated driver is always just one race away from turning around their fortunes, “you could be one race away from going the other way, too,” Davenport said. “You just never know what’s going to happen in this world, so we’re just grateful to be able to do this.”
