Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway
Notes: PPMS another tough outing for Overton
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Brandon Overton (76) tracks Carson Ferguson (93) at PPMS. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
IMPERIAL, Pa. (Oct. 4) — Brandon Overton had a positive run going in Saturday’s 70-lap Pittsburgher 100 finale at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway. Then it disintegrated because of a late-race flat tire.
Standing in the pit area after climbing out of his car as a disappointed 10th-place finisher, the 34-year-old driver from Evans, Ga., could only shake his head in exasperation. The burst of promise followed by a frustrating demise was effectively a microcosm of his first season driving for the Riggs Motorsports Longhorn Factory Team. | RaceWire
“We’re having a hell of a time,” Overton said. “I don’t know why we can’t get anything to go our way, but it’s like, we do something good, and then something bad happens. We do something good, and then something bad happens. Just like tonight.”
After a non-competitive 11th-place finish in Friday’s 30-lap preliminary feature, Overton showed renewed strength in the headline event of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series weekend. He started ninth and by lap 11 was already in the top five. The next positions came slowly during a long period of green-flag racing, but on lap 55 he overtook eventual runner-up Max Blair of Centerville, Pa., for third.
Moments later, however, Overton pulled up lame on lap 58 with a deflated right-rear tire to draw a caution flag.
“I passed Max before I had the flat,” Overton said. “And as soon as I got around him — I just kind of got him bottled up traffic — then my tire went flat. I don’t know if I run something over or what … or I might have hit the wall.”
There was significant damage to the right-rear spoiler of Overton’s car after he soldiered to a 10th-place finish, but he thought it came from a wall encounter in the closing circuits. It was a moot point, though. He was just frustrated that he couldn’t complete what he thought had the makings of a podium result.
“That was about where I was gonna go,” Overton said, aware that Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., was untouchable as the flag-to-flag winner and holding off Blair would likely have been difficult because “I could visually see him under me just kind of rolling around there.”
Overton felt good about his performance, noting that he ran as hard as he could in pursuit of a solid finish.
“I kind of seen early I wasn’t gonna be good down the track, so I just moved up and just used every little bit I could,” said Overton, who spent most of the race wheeling around the top of the track. “Like I just told (crew chief Anthony) Burroughs, I gave him 115 percent for 70 laps. That’s all I had. If I was going to run decent, that’s where I needed to be.”
The outing marked just Overton’s second career visit to PPMS, a sprawling track known as the Monster Half-Mile. He has bad memories of his previous appearance for 2023’s Pittsburgher 100 because late-race power steering issues caused him to finish ninth and fall out of a Final Four spot in the first season of the Lucas Oil Series Big River Steel Chase for Championship, but remarked that he’s a fan of the track.
“There’s people who don’t like it, but s---, I like the hell out of it,” Overton said. “It’s big and fast. If they had something where they could just give you a little more bottom and a little more top, I think it’d be real badass.
“I mean, it’s badass now, don’t get me wrong. Like, you watch them work on it, they kind of go out there with a motor grader a little bit and just kind of water it all day, nothing crazy, and it races good. For a big track, it races really good.”
The place didn’t bring him the uplifting result he was chasing, though. He remains winless since his lone Lucas Oil Series victory of the season on May 2 at Circle City Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind., and, while he still has several races on his 2025 schedule — including this weekend’s Hunt the Front-sanctioned doubleheader at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C., and Oct. 17-18’s Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio — he conceded that he’s ready to flip the calendar and start anew in ’26.
“We just need to hurry up, keep racing and get it done,” said Overton, who has three wins this season, “and then go to work and restart fresh next year.”
Looking for answers
Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., couldn’t have entered the Lucas Oil tour’s Chase for the Championship with greater momentum. He was riding high after a $75,000 Lucas Oil Knoxville Late Model Nationals victory and the opening weekend of the playoffs was right in his backyard at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway.
But Brownstown was a nightmare filled with scrapes and poor finishes (22nd in the C.J. Rayburn Memorial, 17th in the Jackson 100), and the Pittsburgher 100 weekend brought no relief as O’Neal struggled to an eighth-place finish in Friday’s 30-lap preliminary and finished the 70-lap finale two laps down in 21st. In a four-race flash, the 25-year-old star found himself 365 points out of the lead in the standings and with no chance for the championship in the season-ending DTWC at Eldora.
What went wrong? What caused the fall from grace at such a critical point for O’Neal and his Jason Durham-led SSI Motorsports?
O’Neal couldn’t offer a detailed explanation as he stood glumly in his team’s trailer engaged in a post mortem with Durham.
“We just struggled,” O’Neal said. “I mean, it’s really all it is. We’ve been fighting the same problems for the last two weeks.”
O’Neal remarked that “we were good early” while moving from the sixth starting spot to third by lap four, “but just once that brown (moisture) kind of faded we faded with it.” Indeed, after running third for laps 4-8, he plummeted steadily and by lap 25 he was not only outside the top 10 but also one lap down to leader and eventual winner Jonathan Davenport.
The Longhorn Chassis that O’Neal ran at PPMS was brand-new — the team built it in the days after returning from Knoxville to replace the car that was destroyed there in O’Neal’s preliminary feature flip — but he didn’t suggest new-car blues were a reason for his performance.
“We ran a different car at Brownstown last week, so I don’t think it’s anything new car-old car related,” O’Neal said. “Just definitely not where we want to be. We’re better than this. We just all got to get back on the same page and I think it’ll all turn out all right.
“It’s frustrating, but at the end of the day, it’s racing. And these times make us stronger, and as a team, if we can get through these times, we can get through anything. Everybody’s together, nobody’s given up, everybody’s still headstrong, so we’re in good shape there. Just got to get a little bit better, driver and race car.”
J.D.’s purse thoughts
Jonathan Davenport certainly loves cashing rich first-place checks like the one worth $50,000 he collected Saturday for his Double L Motorsports team at PPMS.
But while discussing his second consecutive victory in the Pittsburgher 100 finale, the 41-year-old superstar made it clear that he would be willing to race for major-event purses with a little less money on top if it meant a more lucrative distribution through the field.
“These high-paying races are definitely awesome,” Davenport said. “Fifty-thousand-to-win is great, but, you know, $20,000 for second sucks.”
Davenport said he doesn’t see track and series promoter moving to “restructure the pay the way I think it should be,” but he’ll continue to push for better paybacks in the purses.
“I think it needs to mean something to run in the top five, you know what I mean?” Davenport said. “These races don’t have to pay $100,000, $75,000, $50,000 to win. There ain’t but one person getting that every weekend.”
Davenport has captured four races paying at $50,000-to-win this season, and his Lucas Oil Series earning alone total $473,500, second only to Ricky Thornton Jr.’s $562,400. But he’d like the wealth to be shared a bit more even if that means fewer mega-money winner’s checks because that cash is redistributed to other positions. At PPMS, fifth place paid $6,000, 10th place paid $3,600 and every starter earned at least $2,000.
“It’s great when you get it,” he said of the big-money triumphs, “but there’s a whole lot of haulers in these pit areas that go home losing money every weekend.”
Odds and ends
Max Blair’s runner-up finish continued his annual improvement in the Pittsburgher 100 finale. His previous results were sixth in 2023 and third in ’24. … Third-place finisher Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, stood on the Pittsburgher podium for the third straight following second-place runs in ’23 and ’24. It was, however, the first time he didn’t improve upon his previous year’s finish; he was 22nd, 21st, ninth and sixth in his first four appearances in the event. … Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., finished a career-best fifth in the Pittsburgher finale. His top finish in four previous starts was 12th in 2018, the last time he entered the event. … Carson Ferguson of Lincolnton, N.C., twice climbed as high as fourth in the 70-lapper — laps 12-14 and 30-33 — before settling for a sixth-place finish as his Paylor Motorsports machine became too tight for the late-race conditions. … Josh Richards, the 37-year-old native of Shinnston, W.Va., who on Friday made his first Dirt Late Model feature start in nearly three years, ran a smooth, steady race to finish ninth. He started 11th and fell back as far as 13th early in the race before passing Brandon Overton for ninth coming to the white flag. … Four drivers made first-time starts in Pittsburgher 100 headliner: Donald McIntosh of Dawsonville, Ga. (finished 11th), Daniel Hilsabeck of Earlham, Iowa (16th), Dan Ebert of Lake Shore, Minn. (17th) and Joseph Joiner of Milton, Fla. (18th). … The 39 cars entered in Saturday’s action was up one from last year’s finale, but Friday’s preliminary program produced a larger 44-car field.
