Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Flexibility key for J.D.'s 2026 plans
Jonathan Davenport had some time on his hands last Thursday as he flew out to Central Arizona Speedway in Casa Grande to meet his Double L Motorsports team for the Rio Grande Waste Services Wild West Shootout. He used it to be a little mischievous on social media.
“That’s right,” he said while standing in his trailer at the track during the opening weekend of the miniseries. “I got bored.” | Complete WWS coverage
As he boarded his plane, Davenport mused in a post that he was “headed to hopefully the first of many new tracks for 2026.” Then after he landed he put up a picture of his car and wrote that he “got to thinking on the flight I might even introduce this ‘ol girl to some places I haven’t been to in a while.”
It seemed to be a casual announcement of ’26 plans for the 42-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga. — and soon enough, the popular belief formed that he was leaving the the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series to chase the World of Outlaws Late Model Series for the first time in his career.
“Everybody thought they knew what I was going to do, I guess,” Davenport said with a sly smile. “Even (WoO tour director Steve) Francis texted me a couple times, he’s like, ‘Is there something I need to know?’ ”
Davenport’s response to Francis: “No, not really.”
All that WoO invasion speculation was just that. Before Friday’s Wild West Shootout practice, Davenport went public with his plans, revealing that he was indeed not going to follow the Lucas Oil Series full-time in 2026 but turn to running an independent schedule in which he pursues big-money events and other races that, well, just happen to interest him.
“I want to go to places that I like to go to that I don’t never get to go to,” Davenport said. “There’s a few places that are having some good races this year and I would like to get to those, go to some new places maybe … just do what we want to do.”
This isn’t the first time, of course, that Davenport has opted to pick-and-choose his starts rather than points-chase since he made his initial national touring assault in 2012 and earned Lucas Oil Series Rookie of the Year honors driving for NASCAR racer Clint Bowyer. He’s actually gone back and forth between the Lucas Oil circuit and an independent schedule, doing three separate stints on the Lucas Oil trail — 2015-16 (with K&L Rumley Enterprises) and 2018-21 (Double L) and 2023-25 (Double L again). His last independent campaign, in 2022, happened to be the richest single season of his career, a spectacular 24-victory year in which he topped $2 million in earnings, almost half of which came from his victory in the Eldora Million.
There is a difference in the Dirt Late Model landscape in 2026 compared to ’22 when it comes to a driver of Davenport’s talent foregoing a national tour run. No Eldora Million opportunity this year to greatly pad the bank account certainly sticks out, but ’22 also offered some additional money-making chances for an independent — namely, the XR Super Series, which had high-dollar purses and allowed Davenport to pocket a $100,000 points championship over a modest 22-race schedule.
In addition, the purses, points funds and traveling perks for the national tours have grown since ’22. The Lucas Oil Series, for instance, paid $150,000 to its champion in 2022 — double the $75,000 that the title was worth just the previous year — but in ’26 it will pay $250,000 for the points crown with a new five-race bonus program to close the season offering another $100,000 to the champion of the series-within-the-series.
With the money now available on the national circuits, it’s become very difficult — perhaps even impossible — for a driver to earn more money racing an independent schedule without simply capturing virtually every big-money show in the sport. Davenport acknowledged the fact when discussing his plans.
“I know I’m not going to make as much money,” said Davenport, who won Lucas Oil Series titles in 2015, ’18 and ’19 and has finished worse than fourth in the standings just once in his 10 seasons as a full-timer. “I know that for sure. I’m not going to win everything.
“But at some point, you got to realize that it ain’t all about money. It’s about spending time with people you want to and to be places where you want to go.”
Davenport pointed out that yes, the hefty points-fund checks that come with following a series are lucrative, but it also takes plenty of toil and sacrifice to gain them. After spend most of the past decade-plus putting in the time to do that — and earning substantial money to build a nest egg for himself and his family — he just feels that he would prefer to not race with all that pressure.
“Just like, you know, anything could happen to any of us at any time,” Davenport said. “And if, God forbid, if any of my guys get sick, any of their loved ones get sick, they can miss a race. I can’t. Like, no matter what happens, if we’re running a series and I miss that race, we’ve already killed the whole year.
“So just things like that, just looking back, I don’t want to have to be somewhere.”
Davenport wants to open up his schedule to give him more time to join his wife, Rachel, in spending time with their 13-year-old son Blane, a seventh-grader who has come to enjoy participating on his school’s fishing team.
“He does fishing tournaments with his school team and the school plays off of other ones also,” Davenport said. “There won’t be as many in the summertime, but, you know, there’s some in February, some in March, April, May, at least one or two a month. They’ll pre-fish on Friday, they'll have a tournament Saturday and sometimes they have tournaments on Sunday. I just want to do that some, be there when he’s doing that.
“These are the years my son’s growing and developing into a young man. I mean, I’ve got like five years or whatever and he’s graduating high school and he's moving on with his own life.”
Davenport can perhaps envision a time in the coming years when his son would be old enough to travel with him.
“There’s plenty of guys that are in their late 40s that can still run a national tour,” Davenport said. “I mean, Blane might want to go back on the road with me after he gets out of school or whatever. I’m just saying that there is a possibility that I can always come back and run a series, too, because the money is really, really good. But right now, I want to do what we all want to do.
“And luckily, I’ve got great car owners, great sponsors, partners, that allow me to do that.”
Davenport’s longtime car owner, Lance Landers, is behind his decision to back away from points-chasing. The team also has a new primary sponsor, Ace Doran Hauling, signed on for 2026, so all is well with the team that remains headed by crew chief Cory Fostvedt and returning mechanic Tyler Bragg.
The prospects for the ’26 season are wide-open for Davenport, who is looking to add some variety to his plate. His status in the sport will help him command appearance money from tracks on his own merit and multiple promoters have already begun contacting him in hopes of luring him to their races.
“We got a really good response from everybody wanting us to come race with them, so I said, I need to back off a minute,” Davenport said. “I have to figure out some way to give me a big calendar and write down all the tracks that race against one another on certain weekends before I can commit or whatever to something.
“We’ll just kind of look at the schedule. I talked to (sponsor and promoter Jeff) Hoker a little bit there (at Central Arizona), and he's doing that Speedweek kind of deal in Iowa (in August), so there’s a couple tracks there possibly we might want to run. Then just like Magnolia (Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss.), I like going there. Tazewell (Tennessee), I ain’t been there in a while. I’d like to go back home to Sugar Creek or Tri-County or North Georgia or something like that. Maybe racetracks around Batesville (the Arkansas home-base for his team) a little bit. There’s a couple of tracks in Tennessee I’ve never been to.
“Normally, the last few years, whenever we leave Speedweeks, besides Smoky Mountain (in Maryville, Tenn.), we do not race in the Southeast the rest of the year, besides Charlotte and Senoia at the end of year. There’s six, seven months there that I’m never racing around home ever, or haven’t been. We want to change a little bit of that.
“I’ve been in contact with some people that I never thought that would call me and racetracks I never thought about going to,” he added. “Some places I've heard of but never been to.”
Davenport is hopeful that he can even assist some regional promoters in building bigger events.
“One thing that kills the local tracks, I believe, are all the big guys never have time to go back to their home, or these local tracks, that have a local fan base,” Davenport said. “Yeah, we travel around and our big races get big crowds, but, these $10,000-, $15,000-to-wins at the local track that’s trying to stretch their neck out for their locals, they can never get the big guys to come in to bring the crowd. So I want to help out a little bit, you know. I feel like that’s going to help grow the grassroots part of it.”
Davenport understands that he’ll have to produce a high quantity of wins to make up for lacking points-fund and show-up cash from a national tour, but he’s well prepared for that challenge.
“I mean, we don’t go to a track to try to make the race and then fall back on a provisional, so if we’re going to go somewhere, we go there to win,” Davenport said. “Obviously anything can happen — we have a flat tire or we can start running bad. This is a vicious cycle of running good, running bad, and it all goes around in a circle, but we're on a high wave right now. We finished the (2025) season off really strong, and we had speed all year, really, but a really, really good at the end of the year. Just had some bad luck or we could have almost had two championships” between Lucas Oil and the FloRacing Night in America tour.
Georgia-Florida Speedweeks action isn’t even on Davenport’s agenda at the moment, though he might end up entering a few races. He’s just looking forward to an enjoyable ’26.
“I feel like all these guys are happier, I’m happier, if we’re going to a place that we want to go to,” Davenport said. “I feel like we can win almost anywhere in the country, but if I’m sitting there somewhere that I don’t really like and I run fifth, I’m like, ‘Well, that’s a pretty good good night, but I’d rather be somewhere where I really think I could win.’ We’re just gonna try to go to some places we want to this year and have some fun.”
Ten things worth mentioning
1. When Bobby Pierce headed onto the track for Saturday’s Wild West Shootout feature, he was wearing his Chicago Bears lookalike helmet but not feeling very good about his favorite NFL team’s prospects in their Wild Card playoff game against the Green Bay Packers. They were trailing 21-3 in the third quarter and he fully expected to learn of their defeat after he completed the race. He instead found out that they had made a dramatic comeback to win 31-27 — a great pick-me-up for the Oakwood, Ill., star following his frustrating 13th-place finish in the 50-lapper. “I was pissed off in the trailer after the race, writing notes down, and my mom peeks her head in and is like, ‘You want good news?’” Pierce said. “I’m like, ‘What?’ She’s like, ‘The Bears won!’ ”
2. The Bears’ victory also won Pierce a bet he made with fellow driver Devin Moran after his triumph in October’s Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora Speedway. I was there in the pit area to see the buddies shake on a $100 wager in which Pierce asserted that the Bears would win a playoff game this year and Moran, a Cleveland Browns fan, said the Bears wouldn’t even make the postseason. When I asked Pierce about the bet on Sunday, he said he hadn’t yet heard from Moran. He also noted that he actually forgot the details of the wager when Moran brought it up in a text conversation earlier in the week. “Before the game he was like, ‘The Bears better win or else you owe me a hundred bucks,’ ” Pierce said. “I said, ‘What do you mean? They already made the playoffs. That was our bet.’ That’s what I thought. Then I thought about it and I texted back, and I said anyway, ‘Sure, the Bears gotta win.’ ”
3. Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., was listed on the pre-entry list for the Wild West Shootout and had indicated he planned to run the miniseries with his Riggs Motorsports team, but he was a notable no-show. The team opted to stay on the East Coast and prep for Georgia-Florida Speedweeks by shaking down a pair of new Longhorn Chassis in a test session at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla.
4. Jimmy Owens of Newport, Tenn., is spending week in Arizona at the Wild West Shootout, but not as a driver. He’s providing technical assistance in the pit area to Tucson native Jake O’Neil, who in recent years has based his modified and Dirt Late Model racing on the other side of the country out of Owens’s shop. They have become close and Owens agreed to make the trip west to lend O’Neil’s Dirt Late Model effort a hand.
5. Speaking of Owens, when I asked him about his 2026 racing plans he indicated that his first action of the season with his Koehler Motorsports team might not be until late March or even April. He doesn’t plan to enter any Georgia-Florida Speedweek events — even the Lucas Oil Series shows that are now running over three weekends after the Daytona 500 to create an extended Speedweeks — which would end a long streak of competition in the early-season stretch of racing for the soon-to-be 54-year-old driver.
6. Anyone staying on the grounds of Central Arizona Raceway during the Wild West Shootout has an opportunity to make themselves useful — and have some fun — by waking up early each morning. Adjacent to the track is the Pinal County Animal Control Shelter, which prominently displays signs noting that they’re always looking for volunteers to walk the shelter’s dogs every morning from 6-9 o’clock. I’ve been waiting to see a picture of WWS announcer Ben Shelton leading some dogs around while having a morning coffee.
7. With the World of Outlaws Late Model Series season about to kick off Jan. 22-24 at Volusia Speedway Park, Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., the points runner-up in 2025, is readying for his fourth year running the tour for Ohio team owner Tye Twarog with some faces on his crew. Most notably, Hoffman and Twarog have brought on experienced mechanic Scott Fegter, who has spent recent seasons working for Paylor Motorsports. Darin Townsend is the lone holdover on the crew that also now includes Brayden Sebenoler, a youngster who previously helped Tyler Erb.
8. Twarog noted that he always gives his crew members nicknames. Townsend’s “D-Train” is long established, and he’s tagged Sebenoler as “Bigfoot.” He said he’s “not sure yet” what he’s going to call Fegter, however.
9. With Fegter’s departure from Paylor Motorsports, team owners Donald and Gena Bradsher will have veteran North Carolina racer Dean Bowen as their head wrench assisting third-year Lucas Oil Series driver Carson Ferguson of Lincolnton, N.C. Bowen spent 2025 as Daulton Wilson’s crew chief for the James Rattliff-owned JRR Motorsports operation.
10. More crew news: Big Frog Motorsports, which plans a full-time effort in 2026 with Fayetteville, N.C.’s Daulton Wilson behind the wheel, has added experienced Dirt Late Model hand J.C. Crockett alongside longtime team chief mechanic Mike Rey and Sean Monaghan. Team owner Augie Burttram said a decision on a 2026 schedule hasn’t yet been made but the team appears to be leaning toward chasing the WoO circuit.
