Eldora Speedway
Blair takes blame, Terbo takes aim in DTWC heat
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Max Blair's car ended up atop Tyler Erb's machine. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Oct. 17) — Before even completing a heat-race lap Friday night at Eldora Speedway, Max Blair and Tyler Erb had their Dirt Track World Championship weekends go horribly wrong.
A tangle between the pair at the initial start of the second 10-lap heat left their cars in a heap between turns one and two. Neither driver was pleased with the situation, which was abundantly clear when they simultaneously climbed out of their wrecked machines, locked eyes across the short distance separating them and exchanged verbal barbs and hand gestures. | RaceWire
“He said I’m a no-driving mother (expletive), I suck, all that,” Blair said of Erb. “It was just … Terbo.”
And Erb’s recollection of the heated post-crash confrontation? He said he let loose a series of F-bomb directives and then “ran out of things to say, so I said, ‘You wanna fight?’ And (Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series technical director) Kenute (Mausehund) and all them guys were like, ‘You punch him, you’re out of here!’ ”
Erb, 28, of New Waverly, Texas, never moved close enough to Blair for a physical altercation. Blair, meanwhile, brushed away Erb’s challenge, although the 35-year-old from Centerville, Pa., did call Erb “an idiot” in a terse interview on the FloRacing broadcast while adding that “someday somebody needs to knock his head off” because “the dude has wrecked every car in the pit area.”
It was a war of words that escalated even further in later media interviews each driver conducted. There was no holding back by either racer, no tempering of their opinions on the incident.
The get-together began when Blair, starting outside the front row alongside eventual heat winner Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, drifted to the inside of the track racing down the homestretch as the green flag was displayed. He veered into the third-starting Erb, who went on to make contact with Blair entering turn one. Blair’s car spun up the banked corner with Erb, pounded the outside wall hard nose-first and came to rest with its nose sitting on the hood of Erb’s machine. Michael Leach of Sun River, Mont., was also collected as he slid into the left side of Erb’s car.
Blair conceded that he made a mistake moving to the inside and into Erb’s path on the straightaway, but he felt Erb triggered the carnage that ensued entering turn one by driving into the left side of his car.
“It was really hard to start on the top and Devin got a really good start,” Blair said. “Same thing happened in the first heat, and (outside polesitter) Chris Ferguson kind of turned left down the frontstretch and dove under (polesitter) Carson (Ferguson) going into one and got out of the corner behind him. That's what I was trying to do.
“I looked left. There was nobody there, so I tried to turn down, and, like, I wasn’t even trying to pass Devin. I was more trying to just be second coming out of the (second) corner. And I when I felt (Erb), I got off of him, and if you watch a replay, you’ll see that. I got off of him.
“And he’s got every right to be upset about the start,” he continued. “The initial contact was my bad, but at that point, the dude lost his mind and junked $100,000 worth of race cars for absolutely no reason, because we were still going to be second and third coming out of the corner. All he had to do was just wait a second, and if you want to come bitch at me after the race, come bitch at me after the race. He didn’t need to junk my race car.”
According to Blair, entering turn one Erb “never lifted until he was under my feet. And that’s the honest to God truth. He was the whole way under my feet (in the driver’s side door) before his motor stopped turning 10-grand (RPMs).”
Blair acknowledged that he noticed he was “getting tore down on the internet about my comment (on the FloRacing broadcast),” he said. “But I’m not talking about what happened at the flagstand. I’m talking about what happened in turn one. Coming down at the flagstand, sure, my bad. But that could have been resolved afterwards by a, ‘Hey, man, why’d you turn left?’ I would’ve been like, ‘Sorry about that. My bad.’ That's all that needed to be. It didn’t need to be what this is.”
Erb put the blame squarely on Blair when he rehashed the accident while a Limited Late Model consolation race was on the track. He questioned Blair’s ability in his pointed comments.
“You don’t start on the outside pole of a heat race at Eldora and turn dead left before we get to the flagstand, and continue to turn dead left all the way down the straightaway,” Erb said. “I mean, like, what do you do? If you ask all the drivers here, ‘If you’re on the outside pole, what do you do when you get into one if you need to be in the cushion?’ They’d all say, ‘You enter in the cushion every time.’
“There’s one guy that didn’t enter in the cushion,” he continued, singling out Blair. “Once again, it’s the first corner getting into turn one at Eldora, and if you lift, you’re a pussy. I’m not even mad that he’s dumb. I’m just mad that he's such a pussy, he’s got an $80,000 race car and won’t drive wide-open into the first corner. Enter on the fence and see what happens. How this guy even got on the outside pole is amazing to me. So he qualified not in the bottom, so at what point did he decide he wanted to be in the bottom at the flag stand getting into one of this heat race? It just blows my mind.”
Erb was glad to learn that Blair accepted responsibility for moving low on the front straightaway, saying, “so he knows he was in the wrong.” But it didn’t prompt Erb to ease off.
“The highlight of my life isn’t wrecking Max Blair in this heat race,” Erb said. “The highlight of his year right now is that he got wrecked by me. Quote, unquote — put that in there.”
The driver who likely had the best view of the tangle was Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., who started alongside Erb in fourth. He succinctly summed up the episode when asked for his assessment.
“I kind of watched the whole deal out of my peripheral (vision),” said Hoffman, who narrowly escaped the incident and went on to finish second. “I don’t know where Max thought he was gonna go there. He got a bad start and he decided he was gonna try to get to the bottom, so I see this and I’m trying to get out of the way from him.
“And of all people to try and turn left on, Terbo’s the last guy you’re gonna do that to. He found out why.”
Blair said his impact with Eldora’s concrete was “the hardest hit I’ve taken in a long while,” and the force left him with a sore neck and shoulders. His Centerline Motorsports Longhorn Chassis wasn’t damaged “as bad as I originally thought it was going to be,” but it still will need a new front clip and sustained plenty of other problems.
Seeing his hopes of cracking the field for Saturday’s 100-lap, $100,000-to-win DTWC effectively end was frustrating enough for Blair, but his affinity for the wrecked car was high as well.
“This car has five races on it,” Blair said. “The Dream (at Eldora in June), we ran really well. We were really good at the World (100 last month) and broke a fan belt (early in the finale). I run it at (Pennsylvania’s) Port Royal (in August), ran top five, and I ran it at Pittsburgh (Oct. 3-4’s Lucas Oil-sanctioned Pittsburgher weekend) and ran second and third, so I really liked it, so it sucks.”
Erb’s Best Performance Motorsports Rocket Chassis sustained significant body damage and other broken parts, including the radiator, carburetor and air cleaner from Blair’s car running up on its hood. He was planning to take the car back to the team’s nearby shop in St. Marys, Ohio, put in a new rear deck and fix all the damaged components, but he had no intentions of bringing it, or a backup car, to Eldora on Saturday to run a B-main.
“I’m going to be sitting up there tomorrow and watching,” Erb said, pointing toward the grandstand. “Then we’ll go to Whynot (Motorsports Park in Meridian, Miss.) next week.”
