Eldora Speedway
Notes: Rocket1 progress on slick track continues
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Brandon Sheppard (1) was third at the DTWC. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Oct. 18) — Brandon Sheppard fell short of winning a record sixth Dirt Track World Championship for the second consecutive year in the event’s 45th running Saturday at Eldora Speedway, but there was still a clear spark in the New Berlin, Ill., star’s demeanor after his third-place finish. | RaceWire
The particulars of Sheppard’s run to a podium result in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series season finale were pleasing to the 32-year-old driver of the Mark Richards-fielded Rocket Chassis house car.
“Mark and my guys, they’ve been working their tails off on this thing trying to get me to where I’m better, you know, at the end of the race,” Sheppard said while watching his Rocket1 machine go through technical inspection after the 100-lap feature. “And the later the race got, the better I was getting. The less cushion I would have to use, the straighter I could drive, the better I was getting.
“So,” he added, “I think Mark and the boys made big gains on this thing.”
Sheppard thought back to June’s Dream at Eldora when he started third but faded to a 10th-place finish. It was a frustrating because it was clear he lacked speed over the long haul on a slick track surface, and his Richards-led team has been focused on righting that shortcoming with the new Rocket XR2 model that debuted at midseason.
A quiet but forward-moving run in last month’s World 100 at Eldora — Sheppard started eighth and finished sixth — was a good sign. The uptick continued in extra-distance races Sept. 20 at Knoxville (Iowa) Raceway (finished fourth) and Oct. 4 at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway in Imperial (fifth) and showed up even more on Saturday.
While Sheppard never seriously threatened to win the DTWC that was captured by Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., he came on as the race wound down. He fell back as far as eighth during the feature’s first half and didn’t crack the top five until lap 63, but he kept digging and passed 2025 Lucas Oil Series champion Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, for third on lap 92 and stayed there for his first top-five finish in an Eldora crown jewel since he won the 2023 DTWC.
“In that slick condition (late in Saturday’s race), we’ve been struggling,” Sheppard said. “We ran sixth in the World and we thought, OK, you know, we’re getting better. We ran OK at Pittsburgh and Knoxville — same deal, end of the race we were coming forward.
“They’ve been just working day in and day out trying to figure out that little bit of a balance issue that we’re having late in the race in the slick, and tonight, I think we showed a lot of speed late in the race. The less cushion that I had to use, the better I was, so the beginning of the race, I mean, you had to be hauling on the cushion and I was just too tight to run up there is all there is to. So I was falling back, I’d get a few spots or fall back however the restarts played out.”
Once the cushion wasn’t so dominant and the half-mile oval’s surface shined up, Sheppard was running like he knows is necessary to win major events. His performance cemented the positive feeling about his prospects that he’s been building as he nears the end of his return season with the Rocket1 gang.
“Honestly, in the past month, I’ve been saying, ‘Man, I’m looking forward to the end of the year,’ ” said Sheppard, who failed to grab a Lucas Oil Series Big Four berth for the Chase for the Championship but secured a fifth-place points finish worth $100,000. “Not because it’s the end of the year, not because I’m ready to be done. It’s because I was excited to come back here, and I was excited to go to Knoxville and Pittsburgh, and I’m excited to go to (The Dirt Track at) Charlotte (for Nov. 5-8’s World Finals), all these big tracks where the little, small thing that we’ve had to fix shows up. We’ve inched closer and closer and we’re right there on top of it now.
“My past four months have just really lit a fire under my ass. If we could start next year tomorrow, and reset the points, I mean, let’s go. I’m feeling good. The team’s feeling good.”
Another strong run
The DTWC’s late stages were the time when Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., came alive in his drive to a fifth-place finish.
Hoffman, 33, spent most of the distance waiting for the Eldora surface to slow down to his liking. There was too much grip, and a cushion that was too thick, for the Tye Twarog Motorsports driver who has developed a knack for shining in the slick at the famed facility.
“The track was probably a little bit faster than what we typically see here early,” Hoffman said. “That’s where we struggle a little bit, and then as the track slows down, then we come back to it.”
Hoffman started ninth and briefly climbed to sixth for laps 18-26 before falling back as far as 12th. He finally cracked the top five following a lap-88 restart.
“Me and (sixth-place finisher Mike) Marlar were talking, a lot of it was just where you ended up on restarts, as far as inside lane or outside lane,” Hoffman said. “The outside lane was so much better. You were able to carry way more speed and it could get you at least one or two cars pretty much every caution. Finally at the end I got the outside twice and was able to roll up there.”
Hoffman found himself in a battle for fourth in the final laps with Devin Moran, who was on his way to clinching the $250,000 Lucas Oil Series title. That put Hoffman in a decidedly awkward position where he felt he could gain more spots by turning up his aggression but, at the same time, not wanting to do anything to hurt Moran’s bid for the championship.
“If I was racing against anybody else on the last couple of laps I probably would’ve run fourth,” Hoffman said. “But it's like, Devin’s racing for a championship so you got to be courteous of that. I was quite a bit better than he was there at the end. I could get all the way to him and then he would rail the top of one and two and get back clear of me. It was fun racing, but you weren’t gonna do nothing stupid.”
The late-race surface was “typically what we see at like lap 50 to 60 on a normal (crown jewel) night here,” Hoffman said. As a result, there wasn’t enough time left for him to push his Longhorn Chassis as high in the finishing order as he thought possible. Nevertheless, his fifth-place finish, coming after third-place runs in the Dream and World 100, made him the lone driver to score a top-five finish in all three Eldora majors this season.
Rice goes home happy
Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky., wasn’t smiling after a rough-and-tumble performance in the DTWC ended with him retiring early for a 19th-place finish. Barely a half-hour later, though, he was beaming on the Eldora stage as the $5,000 winner of the supporting 25-lap Steel Block World Championship for the Burlile Ohio Valley Late Model Dirt Series.
The 27-year-old standout was perfect in the OVS feature, leading from flag-to-flag behind the wheel of a brand-new Rocket XR2 Chassis fielded by Maryland team owner Bruce Kane.
“That thing was good,” Rice said, shaking his head in amazement over the car’s strength. “I know (Rocket’s) Mark (Richards), Danny (White) and Joel (Rogers) all went over it before we got here this weekend and worked on it, but man … I don’t want to say it was easy, but it was easy. That thing was really damn good.”
Rice received the opportunity to pull double-duty earlier in the week when he received a phone call from Kane, who had fresh Rocket cars to enter in both the Limited and Super Late Model portions of the weekend but no driver with Wil Herrington of Hawkinsville, Ga., not making the trip north. Kane enlisted Colten Burdette of Parkersburg, W.Va., to pilot his Super and secured Rice’s services for the Limited Late Model.
“He was like, ‘You want to race it?’ ” Rice said of his conversation with Kane. “I’m like, ‘Well, they start on Thursday and I can’t, I got to work.’ He was like, ‘No, they start on Friday,’ so I was like, ‘Well, yeah, hell, I’ll do it.’
“When he said, ‘Hey, it's a new car,’ I was like, well, it’s probably got a night or two on it. It didn’t even have holes in the floor pan for the seat yet. It was brand new.
“I’m glad I could not only win for him but not put a scratch on it. I don’t even think he’s got to wash the damn thing,” he added. “So now he’s still got a brand new car sitting there.”
Rice felt running Kane’s new car “helped us on our stuff.” Indeed, he had to start at the back of a Friday heat with his Rick Jones-owned Rocket Chassis after problems in qualifying left him last in the results but rallied to transfer through a Saturday B-main. He proceeded to march from the 20th starting spot to 10th by lap 31, but on that same circuit his hopes took a significant turn for the worst.
“Hudson (O’Neal) got in the wall in two and I went down to miss him and me and Brian Shirley hit wheels,” Rice said. “My tape mark moved on my steering wheel, so something on the left-front was bent. I could feel it like it almost had like a drag to it. Then I knew it was just a matter of time before I ended up stuffing it … and I ended up stuffing it” into the wall to end his race on lap 75.
Odds and ends
The breakdown of chassis brands represented in the DTWC feature was 18 Longhorns, five Rockets and one entry for Team Zero, Stinger and Capital. … Four of the top-five and eight of the top-10 finishers drove Longhorn Chassis. … First-time DTWC feature starters were Daniel Hilsabeck of Earlham, Iowa (finished 16th), Donald McIntosh of Dawsonville, Ga. (20th), Joseph Joiner of Milton, Fla. (21st) and Dan Ebert of Lake Shore, Minn. (22nd). … With the announcement that promoter Carl Short will take the DTWC back to West Virginia Motor Speedway in Parkersburg for next year’s 46th edition, a look at the feature finish for the last DTWC contested at WVMS, in 2010, shows six drivers who entered this year’s DTWC. The group included Jonathan Davenport (finished fourth in 2010 at WVMS), Jimmy Owens (fifth), Mike Marlar (sixth), Dale McDowell (12th), Dennis Erb Jr. (19th) and Matt Miller (27th). … Earl Pearson Jr. of Jacksonville, Fla., who was at Eldora working the DTWC as a Lucas Oil Series official, won the 2010 DTWC at WVMS.
