Senoia Raceway
Senoia demise adds to Overton's frustrations
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Brandon Overton's night ended with his car on a rollback. (Kevin Ritchie)
Brandon Overton wouldn’t change a thing about how he handled Saturday’s skirmish with Bobby Pierce at Senoia (Ga.) Raceway — not the helmet throw, the confrontation, how he reached into Pierce’s cockpit to smack his visor, or his pointed remarks toward Pierce that could be vaguely heard by FloRacing viewers. | RaceWire
The 34-year-old Evans, Ga., driver wouldn’t have even raced Pierce any differently in the 75-lap Peach State Classic finale of FloRacing Night in America presented by Kubota despite contact with Pierce that triggered a flat right-front tire and lap-53 wreck that ended his night while running third.
“My point of view is still the same exact thing that I thought happened when it happened,” Overton said in a Sunday phone interview after a night to sleep on the $30,000-to-win event won by Jonathan Davenport in which Pierce clinched the series championship by six points.
“Like, I literally was fine,” Overton said. “Like I’m cool. My car probably isn’t good enough to beat J.D., but I could run top-three and was kind of happy. This is gonna be good.”
But Overton’s solid night unraveled with 20-plus laps remaining while battling Pierce for second entering turn three.
“He goes from the pit gate entrance (on the outside wall of the backstretch), as hard left as he can (toward the bottom of the track),” Overton continued. “That got me in his bad air that got me about spun out. That got me rammed into his left-rear that flattened his left-rear and flattened my right-front. He put me and him in a s----- situation. At the end of the day, that’s all it boils down to. If we would’ve kept on going and run fourth or fifth, I wouldn’t have even said anything to him. I’m just mad I literally totaled out a car that had three races on it.”
Overton insisted he wasn’t mad at being chopped off — “that’s how everyone races, especially him,” he added — but was angry that he’d given Pierce ample room.
“We had a restart, Bobby pulls up besides me — I choose the bottom, Bobby chooses the top,” Overton said. “When he pulled up beside me, the first thing that goes through my head is, ‘Damn he’s racing for a championship. I really don’t need to drive in there and try to slide him because he’s probably not gonna lift ‘cause he needs to do good.’ You know what I mean? I didn’t want to get in a bad situation.
“I leave him the whole top going through (turns) one and two. Like, I didn’t slide him. That’s how I got into second — I slid somebody. But me trying to be respectful knowing he has a $75,000 championship on the line. ‘Do nothing stupid, let them race it out.’ Then we get to three and he hangs a left.
“I get too close to him, I get behind him, I slide into him. Obviously it punctures my right-front tire, so whatever. The cutoff, the chopoff, whatever, I was just kind of like, ‘What the hell? Why would you do that?’ But what the hell, everyone drives like that. Then by the time I get to the flagstand, I get to one and my right-front blows out and I knock the s--- outta the wall. That’s why I was mad.”
In his postrace interview with FloRacing’s Earl Hoon on Saturday, Pierce, who endured his own flat tire in the incident in a chaotic race where his title was often in doubt, understood Overton’s frustration.
"I was like, ‘Man, all I need to do is run top-seven; I wasn't trying to wreck you in the wall,’ ” Pierce said of what he told Overton when the Longhorn Factory Team driver team confronted him angrily in the hot pit. The tour champion said he’d review the video.
“I know he's mad and he has every right to be,” Pierce added. “If so, I'm gonna take the blame on that, and if he thinks he owes me one, he owes me.”
Overton prefers not to retaliate because “I ain’t holding no grudges.”
“Am I gonna wreck him? Probably not. Who the hell have I ever wrecked as long as I’ve been racing?” said Overton, whose next race is indoors for next month’s Kubota Gateway Dirt Nationals. “As I said, I got it out of my system. I’m fine. We’re gonna go and have a good time at The Dome and race. I’m sure Bobby will run into somebody at The Dome and they’ll be wanting to whip their ass.”
The 19th-starting Pierce admitted he “had to make some dicey moves coming through the field,” including ruffling the feathers of Ashton Winger in an earlier incident. Overton, though, draws the line between what’s fair and foul.
“He can be one of the best there is. He’s really good, he’s really fast, he does a helluva job,” Overton said of Pierce. “But he’s better than what he does sometimes, like some of the decisions. That’s why I’m mad. … We can race without killing each other.
“Like, you don’t have to race crazy. I feel like I’ve raced with Bobby long enough now, like why would you run into me? Like, if you initiate the situation, why would you do that to me? You know what I mean?”
The Overton-Pierce scrape is, in part, a byproduct of tight rules packages and razor-thin margins in modern Dirt Late Model racing, Overton said.
"Our racing, honestly, our racing sucks,” he said. “It’s really hard to pass. You got to drive aggressive. Like I said, you can drive aggressive and not do it the way they do it, though. You don’t have to completely run them over or put them in bad, bad situations. You can race and be respectful, and race hard.
“Some of them just give up and say, ‘Hell with them, I’ll wreck ‘em or land on their nose, or not even give them a chance to turn under.’ ”
Overton was comfortable with his response to the tangle, too.
“I’m thinking we’re gonna leave here with a top-three podium at worst. And then I leave on the rollback,” he said. “I was aggravated but … it’s not like I really went out there and showed my ass, and done some crazy stuff to make a highlight. I didn’t drive my car backward to try and kill somebody.”
Senoia's conclusion added to his frustrations of a season with single national touring victory.
“It all boils down to a frustrating year,” he said. “You’re 20 laps from ending on a good note. I was gonna run second or third, right? End on a good note. Instead we end with the engine sitting in the cockpit. Like, that’s dumb. … It is what it is. Like I said, I got all my anger out. And we’ll move on.”
