The Dirt Track at Charlotte
J.D. displays Charlotte skills in dominating win
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Jonathan Davenport in victory lane. (Zach Yost)
CONCORD, N.C. (Nov. 7) — Jonathan Davenport is already considered a king of Eldora Speedway. Now he’s one at The Dirt Track at Charlotte too?
Maybe not exactly, but the 42-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga., is certainly in the conversation. With a convincing flag-to-flag victory worth $15,000 in Friday’s 35-lap World Finals feature, he tied Jimmy Owens of Newport, Tenn., as the the winningest driver in the history 18-year history of the season-ending World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series event. | RaceWire
Davenport, one week after celebrating his birthday on Halloween, recorded his seventh career triumph in World Finals action to match the 53-year-old Owens’s total. No other weekend driver more than three World Finals victories.
“That’s awesome. That’s a lot,” Davenport said when informed of his achievement during postrace technical inspection in the pit area. “Jimmy’s always been good here.”
This latest Charlotte score — Davenport’s first since the opener of the first three-race World Finals in 2022 — might have been one of his most dominant efforts in the event. He parlayed the fast-time honors he earned for Friday’s show on Wednesday night into a heat win, pole starting spot in the pre-race redraw and complete control of the entire caution-free feature.
Drake Troutman of Hyndman, Pa., a rising 20-year-old WoO regular whom Davenport has mentored this season, was the only driver who sniffed Davenport’s exhaust during the 35-lapper. It was only briefly and early in the race, though, as Davenport cut masterfully through lapped traffic to beat Troutman by 2.026 seconds.
Davenport rebounded superbly from a disappointing opening-night performance that saw him finish 28th as the first retiree with broken rear-end gears, though his Double L Motorsports Longhorn Chassis had plenty of speed before his demise.
“I mean, we was really good,” Davenport said of his Thursday outing. “I just didn’t get a good start in the heat race. We was a little faster than (winner) Brandon (Sheppard) and I messed up, and then I ran him back down and just couldn’t get by him in the heat race (resulting in an eighth-place starting spot).
“And then in the feature, I really just put myself in a bad position on the first lap and fell back quite a ways (outside the top 10). But once we got going and got out of the hornet’s nest there, we looked back at our (lap) times and we kind of mirrored the leaders there. So we knew we had a good car, we just needed to have track position.
“Then, of course, we had the bad luck with the parts failure last night,” he added. “The guys worked hard and changed a whole bunch of stuff today to try to get ahead of that, you know, what could else go wrong because of that.”
Davenport’s fortunes righted themselves Friday. He caught a significant break in his heat when he inherited the lead upon the lap-six retirement of Gray Court, S.C.’s Chris Madden with a broken rear end and then drew the pole position for the feature to put him precisely where he wanted to be.
“We got clean air and we got to show how good our car was,” Davenport said.
Davenport’s savvy and experience was on full display as he negotiated his way through slower cars. He pulled away from Troutman with his slick moves.
“Once we got to traffic I felt like I got through the first through four pretty quick and pretty good,” Davenport said. “And then once I got by them, the guys in front of those were racing for position so I was just trying to pick my lanes cautiously, but also trying to keep my momentum up and keep rolling and not get bogged down and just keep changing my line a little bit — that way, if somebody was right behind me, they couldn’t get into one rhythm and be able to roll by me.”
Lapped traffic contributed to Sheppard’s last-lap loss to Hudson O’Neal in Thursday’s feature because the New Berlin, Ill., driver slipped high in the crumbs thrown up the track by the slower cars, but Davenport wasn’t hampered by a similar occurrence.
“They were there a little bit, but it wasn’t as bad as last night,” Davenport said when asked about the “crumbs” on the track. “Last night (the surface) had more of a bottom to throw stuff out, so, the crumbs, I’d say, wasn’t as thick, but obviously, when you go through there, you can get in ‘em.”
Davenport used one of the tricks he’s picked up as a Southeast born-and-bred racer to avoid putting himself in a bad position amid slower traffic.
“The good thing about the Carolinas is that you can actually see where the bad area is because that’s where all the dust is moving at,” Davenport said. “You gotta know what you’re looking for, but you just got to make sure you’re as far away from them as you can be, or depending on where you’re at, you need to be closer to them. So it just all depends.”
The triumph added another notch to Davenport’s record of success at the World Finals, an event in which his participation runs deep. He’s one of just three drivers in this year’s field who started at least of the two features during the inaugural World Finals in 2007 (Madden and Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., are the others), and he’s entered every World Finals except in 2009.
Davenport’s World Finals ledger shows 12 top-five and 20 top-10 finishes in his 28 feature starts (he has absorbed eight DNQs over the years) with his victories coming behind the wheel of the Barry Wright Race Cars house car (2010 and ’11), the K&L Rumley Enterprises No. 6 (2015) and Lance Landers’s Double L entry (two in ’21, ’22 and Friday). He’s one of just two drivers to sweep a two-race World Finals weekend alongside, of course, Owens, who doubled up in 2012.
The victory was Davenport’s 18th overall of a strong 2025 season that isn’t quite over after Saturday’s $25,000-to-win World Finals finale. He’s scheduled to run next weekend’s FloRacing Night in America Peach State Classic at Senoia (Ga.) Raceway and Decatur. 4-6’s Gateway Dirt Nationals at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo.
And Davenport and the Double L team are already looking toward ’26. There’s speculation that he might not return to the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series next season, running an independent schedule, but he’s not yet ready to confirm his plans.
“We know what we’re going to do next year, but we’ve not released it,” Davenport said. “We’re considering a lot of things, but we pretty much know what we’re going to do.
“But we’ve got some other things coming down the pike, so yeah, right now we’re focused on tomorrow night. And then after that, we’re going to focus on trying to win the Flo championship at Senoia. From then on, you know, we’ll just let the cards fall how they are going to.”
