Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Blair finding rhythm on big tracks
Max Blair was in street clothes, sipping from a can of beer and talking with friends after finishing second in Saturday’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned Pittsburgher 100 finale and winning the supporting RUSH Crate Late Model Bill Hendren Memorial at Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway in Imperial, when he was asked if the track just outside the Steel City was his favorite.
“It is now,” he replied with a bright smile.
That, of course, was a strange thing for the 35-year-old driver from Centerville, Pa., to say. He even admitted that, just a few short years ago, he could have never imagined possessing such a feeling. Long, fast half-mile ovals like PPMS — a joint known as the Monster Half-Mile — were always anathema to Blair, who was born-and-bred on the bullrings in and around his native western Pennsylvania.
But the times — specifically Blair’s skills and racing resources — have altered his calculations. He’s developed into a driver who actually looks forward to events at sprawling tracks like PPMS. In fact, the Pittsburgher 100 was one of his most anticipated weekends of the 2025 season.
“This one’s been circled all year,” said Blair, who also finished third in Friday’s 30-lap Pittsburgher 100 preliminary feature and fifth in the evening’s RUSH Crate Late Model tuneup. “We ran really well here last year in the Pittsburgher. Not in the Crate race, but the Super race (finishing third in the 70-lap headliner), so I’ve been excited to come to this one all year.”
Blair became a national touring regular in 2022 after spending more than a decade excelling on the regional and local level, a development that certainly helped make him a better, more well-rounded racer. Having better equipment at his disposal than he did while campaigning family-owned cars — first with Viper Motorsports, then the Briggs Transport team and, for the last two seasons, Brad Spochacz’s Centerline Motorsports — has increased his prospects at large tracks as well.
Nevertheless, there’s just a comfort level Blair has found that has allowed him to become a bona fide contender on the circuit’s biggest speedways.
“All these big racetracks, I’ve run well at them in the last couple years, and I don’t really have an explanation for it,” Blair said. “Because growing up, I was terrible on big racetracks. I grew up at (third-mile ovals like) Stateline (Speedway in Busti, N.Y.) and Eriez (Speedway in Hammett, Pa.). We’d come here, Port Royal (Speedway) or something, and I dreaded coming to these places.
“We got in these Longhorn cars (for the 2024 season with his move to Centerline Motorsports), and as soon as we got in these cars, I got way better at these racetracks. But now I struggle at them other racetracks that I used be good at, so …”
Blair hasn’t forgotten how to circle the tracks where he cut his racing teeth — whenever he visits Stateline or Eriez he’s the odds-on favorite to reach victory lane — but it's true that he hasn’t enjoyed as much success this season at smaller tracks outside his home area as he has at the big ones. In fact, just one week before the Pittsburgher weekend, he entered the Lucas Oil Series doubleheader at the quarter-mile Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway and was a non-qualifier for both Friday’s C.J. Rayburn Memorial (albeit due to a “brain fart” when he was disqualified from a heat transfer spot for failing to report to the scales) and Saturday’s Jackson 100. That lost weekend came after he began September by making his first-ever start in the World 100 finale at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, a decidedly big, fast track.
The up-and-down nature of Blair’s last month — between Eldora and Brownstown he won a combined three Super Late Model and two Crate features on consecutive weekends at Stateline and Eriez — is really a snapshot of his season as a whole. He hasn’t been able to put together any extended stretches of success while racing at the division’s highest level.
“We run well, and then we’re terrible. We run well, and then we're terrible,” Blair said. “Just really inconsistent. It’s not that we’ve been awful all the time. We’ve had some really good runs, like probably better runs than ever, you know what I mean? But just … consistency. The consistency hasn’t been there.”
Sometimes even especially promising outings have gone bad for Blair.
“Eldora, for example,” he said, looking back at last month’s World 100. “We raced our way into the World, it’s the first time I’ve ever made the World (in three tries), and then on lap 30 or whatever it is, a fan belt breaks (resulting in a 27th-place finish). Like, that don’t happen. Just the way our year’s gone.”
Blair has had some solid performances in major events this season. At Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa., he finished third in both the Firecracker 100 and Hillbilly Hundred. He was seventh in Eldora’s Dream, seventh in the Rumble by the River at Port Royal, 10th in the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway. He also has tallied a healthy 16 victories overall in ’25, including two five-figure scores at Stateline and one at McKean County Raceway in East Smethport, Pa., all the wins (11 Super, five Crate) have come on home turf (Stateline, Eriez, McKean County, PPMS and Tri-City Raceway Park in Franklin, Pa.) in between his far-flung travels. He hasn’t captured a single national touring checkered flag, and that’s a frustrating fact for a driver who hasn’t won a full-field national event since a WoO score on May 19, 2022, at Bloomsburg (Pa.) Fair Raceway.
The 2025 campaign actually started in uplifting fashion for Blair with an especially strong DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., which sent him out of Speedweeks ranked fifth in the WoO points standings. He decided to switch back to chasing the WoO schedule — he was a tour regular in 2022 before following the Lucas Oil Series in 2023-24 — but proceeded to record just a single top-10 finish in 11 post-Speedweeks starts to tumble to a distant 10th in the standings, prompting him to drop off the series in late May and spend the rest of the season picking-and-choosing his races.
Beyond his struggles on the WoO circuit, perhaps the prime reason he opted to leave the series was the fact that the WoO had conflicting races with the Lucas Oil tour’s Firecracker 100 in June and the Pittsburgher 100.
“The Firecracker and this weekend were two very big determining factors in what we did there (with WoO),” Blair said. “And we ran well at both, so it worked out.”
Blair understood that giving up on a postseason points-fund check from the WoO meant that he would need to produce good finishes at Lernerville and PPMS. He said he didn’t feel any extra pressure at the events, but he admitted that his earnings over the two weekends would need to at least come close to matching what he could have collected from the WoO points fund.
“Essentially, yeah,” Blair said.
The gamble worked out in Blair’s favor. At Lernerville, his third-place Firecracker 100 finish was worth $10,000 and a third-place run in the RUSH-sanctioned Bill Emig Memorial brought him $3,500. (He lost a chance at more money because rain washed out the Firecracker’s two preliminary nights.) He did even better at PPMS, earning a combined $34,200 including his runner-up finish in the Pittsburgher 100 finale ($20,000), the Crate victory ($10,000), third-place in Friday’s Lucas Oil prelim ($3,500) and fifth in Friday’s Crate feature ($700).
That’s a total of $47,700 in earnings for Blair over the two weekends — more than 10th place in the WoO points standings ($42,000) pays this season.
“And we needed that, you know, as a team,” Blair said. “We’ve had some bad luck, motor things and stuff here in the last couple months. As a team, we definitely needed a good weekend, so I’m really glad we got one.”
Blair might not have been in Pittsburgher 100 finale winner Jonathan Davenport’s league — no one was as J.D. dominated from flag-to-flag for the $50,000 triumph — but he assuredly shined in the long-distance grind. He hustled forward from the 13th starting spot, cracking the top five by lap 15 and reaching third by lap 24.
“I think we really drove to third pretty quickly, and then J.D. and Ricky (Thornton Jr.) were just gone,” Blair said. “And we had that yellow (on lap 58) and Ricky took the bottom (for the restart) and I got by him (for second). It just all worked out.”
Making just his third career Pittsburgher 100 attempt — he finished sixth in his ’23 debut before improving to third last year — Blair negotiated the oval running “the bottom and through the middle” in a manner that is becoming his PPMS trademark.
“For some reason, I can typically do that here and some guys can’t,” Blair said. “I don’t have a reason for it, but when those guys are running around the top, I can usually run the same speed like a lane lower than them.
“I really don’t know why. Our package, what we’re doing, it just works, you know what I mean? And that’s why sometimes early in the night, I’m not that good, because when you have to be up against that brown, I just, my stuff is not good up there. I need to be able to cut the corner for what I’m doing.”
After jumping into his Crate Late Model — a No. 114 Longhorn Chassis fielded by Dave McManus, the father of Blair’s crew member Kayla McManus — immediately after the Pittsburgher’s postrace ceremonies and driving it to victory, Blair was reminded that his late pass of Thornton took a critical spot away from his good buddy who’s in a tight battle with Devin Moran for the Lucas Oil Series championship. He smirked while acknowledging he might have cost Thornton some critical points, but he had to get everything he could for his own bank account.
“I know. Trust me, I didn’t want to do that,” said Blair, who has developed a close relationship with Thornton and his family. “But the pay difference from second to third is $10,000, and we needed that.”
Blair paused, and then added with a smile, “And he took $10,000 from me at the Firecracker passing me for second, so that was just payback. But his guys were all fist-bumping me and high-fiving me after the race, so it’s all good.”
That’s racing, and as much as Blair would like to see his pal win the title, he’s not going to hold back. He’s trying to make runs like he had at PPMS a more regular occurrence.
“It feels great, but we need to do it more consistently,” said Blair, whose Crate Late Model is a 2022 model that Thornton campaigned while with the SSI Motorsports team. “Like, I don’t want to make it a huge deal (to contend for a major win) because I feel like we should run up front. I feel like with the team we have, we should be competitive … and right now we’re competitive once a month. We need to be competitive every weekend. I think we’re getting there. We’re getting closer. We’re not where we need to be yet, but we’re definitely getting closer.”
In that vein, Blair is already looking toward 2026. He said it’s “100 percent” that he’ll be back as a regular on a national tour, but he doesn’t “necessarily know exactly which one we’re doing because we gotta look at the schedules and make some decisions.”
One thing would seem certain for Blair’s series choice though: being able to run the Pittsburgher 100 will be a prerequisite. He’s come to love PPMS too much to miss it.
Ten things worth mentioning
1. I mentioned this on our last Dirt Reporters podcast, but I’ll reiterate it here: those RUSH Crate Late Models certainly produce a pungent exhaust smell. After spending the Pittsburgher 100 weekend in the PPMS pit area amidst the fumes from the E-85 fuel used by the Crates, I couldn’t help noticing that my clothing took on the aroma of the ethanol-based fuel. I felt like I was still in the pits when I was back in my hotel room each night.
2. Speaking of the E-85 fuel’s smell, I found it humorous when I was talking about it with the father of a driver who often runs Crate events. He said the fuel’s aroma was so strong on him following one evening of racing that, when he returned home, his wife got a whiff of it and asked him if he had spent the night at a bar.
3. While I was chatting with Rocket Chassis co-owner Steve Baker in the PPMS pits after last Friday’s Pittsburgher 100 preliminary program, Rocket1 crew member Austin Hargrove was a few feet away hammering out bent bodywork on the left side of Josh Richards’s car. The sound of smashing metal prompted Baker to quip, “It’s the East Bay alarm clock.” Referring to the rough-and-tumble Winternationals at the closed East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., Baker noted how “every day around 10 in the morning you’d hear that (hammering) noise in the pits.”
4. I bumped into Baker again a short time later away from the track at the nearby Sheetz convenience store, where he was waiting with his wife, Sherre, for their food order to be called. But the former PPMS champion wasn’t the only Dirt Late Model legend I crossed paths with after Friday’s action. After I picked up my late-night snack at Sheetz, I stepped off the elevator at my hotel to see Hall of Famer Gary Stuhler of Greencastle, Pa., who finished 13th in Friday’s 30-lap feature, walking down the hallway with his wife, Jerri, and their son Brandon. They were headed off to visit a nearby casino, where Brandon was the only winner.
5. During Saturday’s finale at PPMS I saw a familiar face from my days as the public relations director for the World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series: veteran crewman Jimmy Frye, who spent the late 2000s on the WoO road working for the Rocket Chassis house car team and the young Josh Richards. Frye, who hasn’t worked in the sport for more than a decade, made the trip to PPMS to witness Richards’s return to competition. He said it was the first time in 12 years that he’s attended a race somewhere other than Muskingum County Speedway, which sits 10 minutes from his Zanesville, Ohio, home.
6. Of course, Frye’s trademark from his days with the Rocket1 team remained. He was wearing perfectly clean white sneakers, just like he did while a crew member. Everyone was always amazed by how Frye never failed to have spic-and-span kicks on his feet despite working in decidedly dirty conditions.
7. Dan Angelicchio of Mount Pleasant, Pa., failed to make Saturday’s Pittsburgher 100 finale for the sixth time in as many attempts since 2015, but the 37-year-old cracked the starting field for Friday’s feature (he finished 20th). He said he was making his sixth start with his new Rocket XR2 Chassis — a stretch that includes a $3,000 ULMS victory on Sept. 19 at Latrobe (Pa.) Speedway — and was pleased with its performance. He also noted that he also now happens to possess all three Rocket XR models with an XR1 and XR1.2 also in his stable.
8. A group of Lucas Oil Series officials enjoyed some pre-race entertainment shortly before the start of Saturday’s hot laps when they spotted corporate marketing and sales director Wayne Castleberry nodding off behind the wheel of the tour’s pace truck parking alongside the series operations trailer. Castleberry, who drives the pace truck, opened his eyes to find a bunch of his series pals staring at him — prompting him to blow the vehicle’s horn at them.
9. When I saw former Dirt Late Model star and current Ricky Thornton Jr. crew member Brian Birkhofer driving through PPMS’s pit area on a motorbike, I recalled him telling me a few years ago that he wasn’t a fan of the motorized two-wheel trend that had overtaken the Dirt Late Model scene. He said he preferred to get some exercise by walking of bicycling through the pits. Yet there he was at PPMS, riding the Koehler Motorsports team’s motorbikes. I asked him about it and he sheepishly smiled. “I know, I always said I wouldn’t do it,” he said with a laugh. “My wife was making fun of me because she saw me riding it on (the FloRacing broadcast), and she knows I always made fun of those guys for riding them.” The 53-year-old paused, and then quipped, “But my knees … and this is a big place!”
10. PPMS winners Max Blair and Carson Ferguson weren’t the only Dirt Late Model regulars who scored open-wheel modified victories over the weekend. WoO regular Ryan Gustin of Marshalltown, Iowa, returned to his modified roots and drove a Chris Kratzer-owned car to a special victory in Saturday’s WoO undercard at 81 Speedway in Park City, Kan., capturing the Ed Gressel Memorial honoring his former car owner. His machine sported a throwback wrap mirroring the look of his modifieds when he drove for Gressel.
