The Dirt Track at Charlotte
J.D. makes right moves winning Charlotte finale
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Jonathan Davenport celebrates at Charlotte. (Zach Yost)
CONCORD, N.C. (Nov. 8) — First it was Hudson O’Neal. Moments later, it was his car owner Kevin Rumley. Then it was Drake Troutman.
They made a steady procession to Jonathan Davenport as soon as the 42-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga., climbed out of his car in the pit area for post-race technical inspection after his $25,000 victory in Saturday’s 50-lap World Finals finale at The Dirt Track at Charlotte, of course to congratulate him on his performance but also acknowledge just how stirring the feature they’d lost to J.D. had been. | RaceWire
Martinsville, Ind.’s O’Neal, who settled for a second-place finish after losing the lead to Davenport for the last time on lap 45, had mentioned before Davenport arrived at the World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series trailer following his victory lane celebration that he he was “gonna give him a smile and a fist bump and tell him that’s the most fun I had in a race car in a while.” He did exactly that.
“That was fun. Good job,” O’Neal did indeed remark to Davenport, who responded with a smile and a heartfelt, “Thanks.”
Rumley, who knows Davenport well and in fact won a World Finals A-main in 2015 with the veteran driving his family’s iconic No. 6, offered almost identical words and a handshake. And Troutman, the 20-year-old WoO regular from Hyndman, Pa., who finished third to complete a World Finals weekend in which he stood on the podium after all three features, interjecting a bit of humor to the congratulatory pat on the back he gave the driver he considers a mentor.
“Nice job old man,” Troutman said with a laugh, before joking to someone as he turned to walk away, “One day he’s gonna retire.”
Davenport savored the praise that came his way. It was gravy poured over a moment that already had him feeling extra excited due to the memorable circumstances of his driver.
“Yeah, for sure, I’m feeling good,” Davenport said as a line of fans formed behind him, patiently waiting for him to finish a postrace interview after the caution-free feature. “That was a hard-fought race. No break, and this place is so fast anyway, even when it slows down, it’s still fast.
“I’m definitely happy and pumped up. It’s not a lot of times when you’re leading and you get passed and you can actually run ‘em back down and pass them back.”
After dominating Friday’s 35-lap preliminary feature off the pole position with a flag-to-flag, caution-free victory worth $15,000, Davenport appeared primed for a repeat effort in the weekend’s headliner. He glided off the outside pole to seize the lead from the polesitting O’Neal at the initial green flag and for much of the race’s first half maintained steady space over the 25-year-old pilot of the K&L Rumley Enterprises Longhorn Chassis.
But O’Neal, who won Thursday’s opening-night feature and finished fifth on Friday, drew close just after the halfway point as lapped traffic stymied Davenport. He shot past Davenport for the lead on lap 32 using the inside lane off turn four.
“I just kind of got held up by those lapped cars and kind of was just riding there,” Davenport said. “I was trying not to, you know, kill my tires and get ‘em too hot. I knew I’d been running in the black the whole time and this place usually grains ‘em off quite a bit, you start spinning them, and then obviously that's going to grain ‘em off even worse and they’re going to be even worse to you in a lap or two.
“So I was just trying to, like, be somewhat patient, but then I couldn’t really turn down like (O’Neal) could and run off the bottom. I was just a little too free to do that. Just a whole lot of things going on there, and there’s some lapped cars kind of dicing around for position also, so he got me.
“I could probably have been a little bit more aggressive with the lapped cars right before he passed me, but I really wasn’t sure how far out I could go and not be spinning my tires,” he added. “I was mainly more worried about not spinning my tires than I was if somebody was creeping up on me. I didn’t want him to pass me, but he kind of snuck behind me before I realized who it was.”
Davenport regained command on lap 34 after O’Neal skated high off turn two, but O’Neal was back in front on lap 35 and actually opened up some breathing room. Davenport wasn’t done, though. The savvy vet in him found a way to rally and, on lap 45, he took the lead after sliding O’Neal through turns one and two.
“We got by a couple of cars and I saw I could keep pace with him,” Davenport said. “I saw I could keep pace with him, and then he kind of stayed leaving off of (turn) four on the bottom. I was afraid he was going to move right back in the middle, where I’d been running, and I wouldn’t have had a shot at him, but he kept sticking with off the bottom off of four there and that's what let me get back to him.
“I could roll pretty good just up in the little cup of the racetrack and got rolling pretty good there, and then he got messed up a little bit behind lapped traffic and I got a run on him right there and slid him back (for the lead). From then, it was just trying to play chess through the lapped cars, keep my momentum up and try not to give him a chance to slide me.”
Davenport took no chances on the final circuit. Well aware that O’Neal surprised Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., with last-corner pass to win Thursday’s feature, he made sure he didn’t stumble rounding the final set of corners.
“Maybe the last lap I got really close to (Chris) Ferguson there (while lapping the North Carolina driver), but I didn’t know where Hudson was so I was just trying to block off the lanes,” said Davenport, whose eighth career World Finals victory made him the event’s all-time winningest driver one night after he had tied Jimmy Owens of Newport, Tenn., for the honor. “I don’t know if I give (Ferguson) a quarterpanel or not. Probably did, you know, but that was for the win on the last lap.”
O’Neal finished 0.607 of a second behind Davenport at the checkered flag, but he was in especially high spirits as he stood near Rumley’s machine during post-race inspection. He savored just being involved in such a competitive battle on a huge Dirt Late Model stage.
In fact, the four lead changes were the most in a World Finals feature since 2021’s finale when Sheppard, Garrett Smith of Eatonton, Ga., and Davenport exchanged the top spot an identical number of times with Davenport leading the final 20 laps for the victory.
“In that situation, there’s nothing more fun than that, whenever you can have an awesome hard race like that,” O’Neal said. “Obviously, we want to come out ahead, but that was probably the most fun I’ve had behind the wheel of the race car in a while. It’s so fun whenever you're racing hard, dodging in and out of lapped traffic. And it was 50 laps green flag so we were in a lot of lapped traffic, we never got out of it.
“That one will put a smile on your face whenever you roll across scales even if we did run second.”
Reviewing the race, O’Neal mused that he “didn’t really show my hand too early,” but he “didn’t take advantage of the time that I had” in front, he said. “I caught him in a clump of cars — they were kind of everywhere in front of us — and we were able to kind of pick our way through and maybe get a little bit of distance, but I just allowed him to kind of get back behind me.”
O’Neal’s ultimate demise came when he couldn’t negotiate through a gaggle of slower machines fast enough in the closing laps.
“Obviously we kind of had some lapped cars get strung out single-file and I was just having a hard time making ground on them,” O’Neal said. “And that meant J.D. could start moving around, and I’m just kind of a sitting duck, you know, when he found the right way to get back by me.
“I thought maybe I was going to have another shot at him there at the end. I ducked under him a couple times, but just never could quite get all the way back to him.”
O’Neal called Saturday’s racing surface “probably the best racetrack we had all weekend as far as being able to use the entirety of the racetrack.” It helped create the enjoyable feature action.
“Anytime you can race hard and clean like that, and have that close of a finish, it’s really, really cool,” O’Neal said. “It’s special, and this is a race I’ll remember for a while.”
Everyone will remember it, including Troutman, who never was quite able to seriously threaten Davenport and O’Neal but certainly was close enough to see the pair squaring off a short distance ahead of him.
“I had the best seat in the house, man,” Troutman said. “I was loving it, just watching it all unfold.”
Troutman paused. He was asked whether he thought Davenport would regain the lead once he lost it and immediately responded in the affirmative.
“I knew he wasn’t gonna be done,” Troutman said. “Man, he’s good. He does some s--- in a race car that a lot of people can’t do, especially on a track like that.”
