Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Too many body blows for old-style body
The car Garrett Alberson entered in last weekend’s Kubota Gateway Dirt Nationals at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo., came to be known as the Time Machine, which was quite appropriate. It was a throwback in a literal sense. Just looking at it transported everyone back to the mid-‘90s.
In a field teeming with vehicles boasting special wraps and color schemes, no car attracted more attention than Alberson’s Roberts Motorsports No. 58. With a body that Alberson painstakingly crafted to mirror a Dirt Late Model from three decades ago, it stood out from the crowd.
“It was kind of fun this morning,” Ken Roberts, Alberson’s team owner, said during Thursday’s weekend-opening program. “There was hundreds of people around our trailer waiting to see him get it unloaded.”
Images of the car posted on social media in the days leading up to the event fueled anticipation for its unveiling. This was, after all, a car that harkened back to an era that many of today’s racers and fans didn’t experience firsthand, which is precisely one of the reasons Alberson came up with the idea.
“It was mostly just to see (a ‘90s-style car) again, you know what I mean?” said Alberson, a 36-year-old from Las Cruces, N.M., who has run the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series full time since 2022. “When I grew up, that’s what they looked like, and I just loved Late Models back then.”
Alberson remarked that “probably a few years ago, watching the Dome, I just got to thinking, If there was a place where you could get away with an old-looking car, it would probably be here.” Aerodynamics, of course, isn’t an overwhelming factor when racing on the temporary fifth-mile oval constructed on The Dome’s concrete floor. “I mean, you definitely need a (rear) deck, and a spoiler probably,” Alberson noted, “but if your car is good, I don’’t think (the body is) a huge deal.”
When Alberson broached his concept for Gateway to Roberts earlier this year, the 63-year-old team owner was entirely on board. Roberts, whose late father, Hershel, was a Midwest Dirt Late Model racing legend, said the team checked with Gateway promoter Cody Sommer to make sure they would be permitted to enter a car carrying an older-style body and then went to work.
“Basically, Garrett had this vision that he's been wanting to do,” Roberts said. “We just told him, ‘Just go for it.’ He’s like a scientist. He brought in his brother (Dylan), and we put them in the corner (of the shop) and they brainstormed and just started building every single piece. Then the rest of us (led by crew chief Zach Houston) worked on the other cars to get them ready for the Wild West Shootout” scheduled for Jan. 10-18 at Central Arizona Raceway in Case Grande.
“We just let Garrett and Dylan do their thing and just let them have fun. Doing this just makes racing fun again, even brings back a lot of memories.”
Indeed, Roberts said the team referred to old pictures of his father’s cars from the early ‘90s for some ideas to incorporate, including the way Hershel’s vehicles had the exhaust coming out the side. The yellow/orange/red airbrushed style of the No. 58 on the doors of the car even was inspired by a No. 86 car that Hershel drove more than 30 years ago.
The centerpiece of the Longhorn Chassis, of course, was its IROC Camaro nose, a shorter, more square front — and one that more closely resembles an actual street car — than the almost wedge-like noses on today’s Dirt Late Models.
“We actually got with Performance (Bodies) at Knoxville (Raceway’s Nationals in September) and we told them what we were thinking (for a nose),” Roberts said. “They said, ‘Yeah, I think we may have something like that.’ They sent a picture to Garrett and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want to do.’ Then he just massaged it from there.”
Alberson and his brother did plenty of specialized work to bring the idea to life.
“Just a lot of little things that I thought would make it look, you know, original and cool,” Alberson said. “Anything that we could do that we thought would help out the looks of it and get people really into it, we tried to within reason.
“I was originally trying get like a fiberglass roof and we asked (Performance Bodies) about it. They dug around but they didn’t find anything, so the whole roof is hand-built. We built the little dash-cover thing. The driver’s compartment’s all aluminum and hand-built. We made custom T-bars so we can get the nose up high enough to make it all look right.”
Alberson said the team “had an old (rear) deck sitting around, like an original deck before all this (body) skew kind of caught on, so we used that. Actually, it was a relatively cheap body to build because we already had all the sheetmetal and the deck was already made and was gonna get thrown away if we didn’t use it.”
The lack of body skew — described as the intentional asymmetrical shaping and angling of race car bodies to manipulate airflow for greater downforce and better cornering grip — was perhaps the most notable element of Alberson’s machine.
“Everything’s straight,” Roberts said. “The body is perfectly straight, going all the way back. He even custom made the flares to go on the nose and the bumpers and all that.”
Adding a little extra time-period spice to Alberson’s look were the decals on the body for the Hav-A-Tampa Dirt Racing Series and STARS tour, two circuits that were popular during the ‘90s.
“My wife (Dani) went to pick up an order from Arizona Sport Shirts in Indianapolis and in their showroom they had old stickers and she was like, ‘Oh, this would be cool,’ ” Alberson said. “She brought them home and showed us and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, they’ve got to go right on the car.’ ”
When Alberson finally had his chance to climb in the car last Friday for his preliminary night of competition, he even realized that the old-style body offered him better sight lines than his current version.
“Really, the view is excellent,” Alberson said. “Like the dash thing, being so short, I mean, you’re not really looking that low normally. Even just sitting in there and looking around in the pits, you can see everything more than normal. And today, the roof is shorter and further to the right than this one, so it’s just a different vibe, you know?”
Alberson’s assessment of the finished product? He smiled when asked that question.
“Oh, I was super pleased the way it came out, and seeing people’s reaction to it,” Alberson said. “I didn’t really necessarily do it for the reactions. I mostly just did it because I thought it would be kind of a cool thing to do. So on a personal level, I was super excited about how it came out. You know, it came out exactly how it was in my mind, you know? Not every project comes out like that.”
The excitement over the car’s appearance, however, didn’t translate into success on the track. Once Alberson hit the bullring, nothing but trouble ensued. On Alberson’s first qualifying lap Friday, he entered turn one too high and clipped the concrete wall and catchfence, ripping the entire rear deck of the car asunder.
Just like that, the beautiful body was left a mangled mess and Alberson, without a qualifying lap, was far behind for the remainder of the weekend.
“I just tried too hard I think,” Alberson said. “We didn't hot-lap very good at all, and we found a couple of things we’d done wrong, things I think we didn’t get adjusted properly, and when we took the green there in qualifying, I think I had a little more straightaway speed than I thought I did because we fixed the couple of issues from hot laps. And all the guys were at the top right against (the wall), so I did that and … I was just trying hard.
“Some days,” he added, “you just don’t do as good a job as you need to.”
Replays shown on The Dome’s video screens gave Alberson an immediate look at what happened as he awaited a tow to the pit area.
“I knew it was pretty bad, but yet, why I stopped is, it actually peeled the battery cables and stuff that are attached to the battery disconnect,” Alberson said. “I would’ve still tried to get my qualifying laps in but it shut me down.”
Alberson, Houston and the rest of the crew were faced with a mangled mess of sheetmetal and other assorted problems. Somehow they managed to patch the car back up in time for Alberson to make the starting grid for the fifth heat race.
“We had to rewire some of the battery stuff,” Alberson said. “We had to change the right-front suspension out of it from where I climbed the wall. And we had to put the body back together.
“One thing I definitely got to say … I give a big shoutout to the people that jumped in there to help us. I’m sure I’ll miss some because I was so busy, but (Jason) Jameson and some of the guys from the Rattliff team were helping out. That was really cool. It was all hands-on deck and the guys made it happen.”
But it was all for naught. Alberson had more problems in his heat, drawing an early caution when he caught the wall and had a piece of bodywork ripped off and later tangling on the last lap with Jody Knowles, who had slowed because of another tangle, while bidding for sixth place. The nose of Alberson’s car took a blow in the heat incident and led to more repairs, which the team completed for Saturday’s show but Alberson’s weekend ended with a fourth-place finish in the first non-qualifiers’ race.
The trials and tribulations during a weekend that began with such positive vibes certainly disappointed Alberson, but he acknowledged that he’s used to the feeling at The Dome. His two previous Gateway appearances brought sad endings as well.
“The first time we ever came (in 2021) we set fast time the first lap (of his qualifying group) and blew up (the engine) the second lap,” said Alberson, who scratched from further action that weekend. “The last time we came (in ’22) I actually won my heat on the prelim night and then was racing for the lead in the prelim show and hit the wall. Then we made the big feature and blew up on the second lap.”
Alberson paused. He shook his head in exasperation, wondering how he can turn around his Gateway fortunes.
“I’ve got to figure out how to, like, tone ‘er down a little bit here I guess,” he said with a good-natured smile.
Ten things worth mentioning
1. One of the nuances that teams have worked on for racing at The Dome was visible on Bobby Pierce’s winning car: a right-rear quarterpanel that curved inward, part of a concerted effort to reduce the risk of the bodywork and spoiler grabbing the track’s catch fence. Pierce’s father and crew chief, Bob Pierce, said he finally convinced his son to try the idea at last year’s Gateway Dirt Nationals. “We did do it one year a while ago with the Pierce (Chassis) car going to Macon (a fifth-mile oval in Illinois) because he kept tearing the right side out there, but it rained out or got called off and it didn’t happen,” Bob said. “I kept telling him, ‘We ought to turn that thing in, like we did for Macon and didn’t even race it.’ And finally, last year, he goes, ‘You know, we need to turn that in.’ ”
2. Bob Pierce said the curved quarterpanel was accompanied by other slight alterations for Dome action. “Actually we scooted the whole rear of the car over, so we kept our same width, and just push it way to the left,” he said. “So the left side’s straight instead of turning in, and we skewed the right side in. It gives him, you know, probably a foot or better more room for the tail before he gets to the cushion to miss the wall.”
3. Bobby Pierce also won both Thursday’s 25-lap preliminary feature and Saturday’s 40-lap finale with the roughly foot-long piece of the rear spoiler at the right-rear corner of the car completely removed. “I backed into the wall after my heat race on Thursday, like an idiot, and took that piece of spoiler off,” Bobby said. “It was kind of a blessing, because we went to work on it and we were like, ‘We ripped it off in qualifying, we ripped it off in the heat race,’ so I didn’t put that little piece on for the feature.” Added Bob Pierce: “Well, he took the little spoiler off, so we just left it off for the feature (both nights), and the right-rear just would accordion in and come back out.” Bobby noted after Saturday’s race that his “spoiler’s just a little beat up, so it caught (the catch fence) just a little bit.”
4. How many Gateway entrants raced with right-rear quarterpanels angled in? Bobby Pierce estimated the number at nearly half the 120-plus-car field. Numerous cars also were seen with the small portion of the spoiler on the right-rear removed.
5. Remember how angry Brandon Overton was with Bobby Pierce after a scrape between the two in Nov. 15’s FloRacing Night in America feature at Senoia (Ga.) Raceway cut his right-front tire and sent him into the wall? How Overton fired his helmet into Pierce’s door during the ensuing caution period? Well, the two buried the hatchet during the Gateway Dirt Nationals. In fact, with Overton looking on with a smile, Pierce played along and autographed the helmet Overton tossed that night.
6. When I asked Jason Feger if his Dome wrap that was made to resemble Ken Schrader’s Kodiak-sponsored NASCAR Cup Series No. 25 from the early ‘90s had received the legendary Missouri driver’s approval, he said he hadn’t talked directly to Schrader but heard that the veteran racer made complimentary comments about Feger’s scheme during an appearance on Kenny Wallace’s podcast. Schrader didn’t attend any of the Gateway Dirt Nationals.
7. Jon Henry of Ada, Ohio, spent the Gateway Dirt Nationals providing crew help to Ethan Dotson’s ASD Motorsports effort. The 39-year-old is interested in returning to more regular Dirt Late Model competition in 2026 after mostly being inactive as a driver in recent years. He made one start this season, on June 28 in a Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series event at Montpelier (Ind.) Motor Speedway, and it wasn’t particularly memorable: he barrel-rolled and suffered a concussion in what he called “the hardest crash I’ve ever had.”
8. Among the notable Dirt Late Model drivers who opted to spectate at The Dome was veteran Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga., who remarked that the metal-crunching nature of the event’s racing isn’t attractive to his younger brother and car owner, Shane. “Whenever I come in the pits Shane always circles around and looks at the car like he’s giving a body damage estimate,” Dale said with a laugh while standing in the pit area amid the sounds of race teams hammering out bent body panels. “He wouldn’t like this.”
9. Lucas Oil Series director Rick Schwallie attended Friday’s Gateway program with his wife, Ashley, just a few weeks removed from undergoing surgery on his left foot. He still has a walking boot on the foot and was wheeling around The Dome with his leg perched on a scooter.
10. Dirt Late Model veteran Dave Hess Jr. of Waterford, Pa., had a rough weekend at The Dome. His Nightmare Before Christmas-themed Late Model sustained significant body damage in a preliminary-night incident and he was involved in a scrape with Ryan Unzicker of El Paso, Ill., in a Saturday non-qualifiers’ race, but he fared even worse with his open-wheel modified. He climbed the backstretch wall and flipped wildly in a Saturday preliminary, leaving his car with heavy damage and his knee sore from banging against the steering column. The accident also briefly knocked the wind out of him, so he was initially unable to “tell them I was OK” when safety workers reached him.
