Lucas Oil Speedway
Sticking with Show-Me pays with magical rally
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Bobby Pierce and wife Abby. (photosbyboyd.smugmug.com)
WHEATLAND, Mo. (May 24) — Rain was pounding down on Lucas Oil Speedway late Saturday afternoon and Bobby Pierce was in his hauler pondering his options to close out the Show-Me 100 weekend. | RaceWire
Should he stay or should he go? Those were the conflicting thoughts running through the mind of the 29-year-old superstar from Oakwood, Ill., who had performed so poorly in Friday’s two preliminary features that he didn’t even lock into one of the 18 starting spots for the 100-lap finale.
Pierce had a lot of work to do in his shop. He was facing an earlier-than-expected haul east for a rescheduled World of Outlaws Late Model Series event Wednesday at Marion Center (Pa.) Raceway. And he was, of course, running like … well, not a positive word.
So there was Pierce, expecting the Show-Me 100 to be pushed to Sunday and contemplating giving up his front-row starting spot in a B-main — and the possibility of a second straight victory in the crown jewel show — to head home early.
After the race was postponed to Sunday and Pierce made a spectacular charge forward from the 20th starting spot to become a back-to-back and three-time Show-Me 100 winner, it seemed crazy to believe he had seriously entertained throwing in the towel on his weekend. But he really did.
“Legit, like me and Bob were talking when it was pouring down rain Saturday, I said, ‘Hey, my phone (app) says it’s supposed to rain for the next four hours like this. I’m not saying the track couldn’t be ready for tomorrow, but sometimes you never know, right?’ ” Pierce said, referring to the conversation he had with father and crew chief Bob Pierce. “And it’s like, Ah, we got a bunch of stuff we want to try to see if we make the car better, and I was like, ‘But I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of work to do back at the shop.’ I said, ‘What do you want to do, dad?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. Go home? It’s up to you.’ ”
Indeed, the elder Pierce listened but left the decision in his son’s hands.
“I thought when it rained he was gonna go, and then he said, ‘What do you think?’ ” Bob Pierce recalled. “I said, ‘Dude, it’s your deal. You own all this s---. You tell me. You got to make some money.’ ”
Bobby Pierce weighed the pros and cons.
“We’ve got a new car sitting in the shop I just got from Longhorn, and it does have, like, a body mostly all on it,” Bobby said of a machine he would like to debut in June 3-6’s Dream week activities at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. “But you know, you get a car, there’s a lot you have to do to it, and by this time right now (Sunday night), we had planned to be home, have the car from this weekend washed, and be working on the new car. Because of the rainout at Marion Center, we have to leave Tuesday afternoon because it’s a 10-hour drive, so it just keeps pushing back our time to work on our new car.”
But Pierce ultimately opted to stick it out at Wheatland. He used the sunny Sunday morning and afternoon to get ahead on some work that he would have done at the shop — pulling the engine from his backup car to send to motor builder Vic Hill for freshening and then making the vehicle race-ready for Marion Center — and father and son moved forward accepting the team is in the midst of a hectic stretch.
“It’s going to be rough on everybody getting home, and we leave Tuesday afternoon and get out there to race (in Pennsylvania) Wednesday night (leading into three more WoO evenings in Ohio),” Bob Pierce said. “I mean, I’m wore out, but hey, I’ve been wore all my life. Why change now?”
There was also another good reason for Pierce to remain in southwestern Missouri for the rain date: he was pretty awful in last year’s Show-Me 100 preliminary programs as well but roared back on Saturday to win the headliner’s $75,000 top prize from the 12th starting spot. Why couldn’t he do it again?
Of course, Pierce’s performance in this year’s two prelim features — a 22nd-place finish one lap down in the 45-lap Tribute to Don & Billie Gibson and a 15th-place result in the 40-lap Cowboy Classic after he started from outside the front row — was even worse than his runs a year ago. So despite his inherent confidence, he wasn’t hopeful of repeating his 2025 rebound.
“I said, ‘Hey, last year might have happened, but this year it’s not happening. We’re way off,’ ” Bobby said. “Really, the only thing that kept me here was we had done a lot of things to the car that we wanted to try. So it wasn’t even like, ‘Oh, we still might have a chance.’ It was just, ‘We’re here. We need to see when we have the car better.’ That’s what we're here to do, so we stayed.
“But we did use the wrong tires in the (prelim) features. Staying with the right-rear (hard-compound) 4 wasn’t the thing to do,” he continued. “And this racetrack, just the dirt is such a weird dirt how it can be kind of slimy and then it doesn’t hurt the tires, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, so it’s a flip of the coin a lot of times.”
Pierce said his team “threw the kitchen sink” at the car and the effort paid off. The No. 32 Longhorn Chassis came alive underneath Bobby on the big stage.
“It was bad” in the preliminary features, Bob Pierce said. “It’s like nothing I done — and me and him talked about — helped, and I said, ‘I don’t know, bud.’ So we just kept slinging a little here, a little there, I mean, stuff you don’t never do. Because, I mean, with this Lucas (Oil Late Model Dirt Series) race, thank God, it’s just money, we don’t have points to worry about like World of Outlaws, so you can kind of do goofy things.
“In the hot-lap session right before his B-main (which Bobby won) I did one little change, and then after that he said the car wasn’t steering right, this, that and the other. I go, ‘Well, then, I’m gonna go a big swing on the right-front” suspension equipped with an Ohlins shock.
Pierce hit the track for the century grind feeling a little better that a turnaround was at hand. He’s experienced and savvy enough now to know a long-distance race is a different animal.
“Come 100 laps, a lot can happen out there for sure,” Bobby said. “It’s a battle of attrition, that’s one, so you gotta be able to put your car in the right spot, but you gotta be good. And I told a bunch of people this weekend, I said, ‘Hey, if we’re good, you can start anywhere in this race.’ I’ve done it several times. Scott (Bloomquist) has come from the back here. You can do that.”
And Pierce did it. Perching his car on the most outer reaches of the 3/8-mile oval virtually from the start, he made a steady advance. When the race’s first caution flag flew on lap 40, he had already reached fifth place.
“They pretty much left the top open for him, like, right off the bat,” Bob Pierce observed. “But it ain’t so much the top I watch to see if we’re gaining something. It’s after he’s off the top, down the straightaway, because you can go a 100 mph in that corner and then blow the tires off on the straightaway. So I watch when it does come off that corner without a big momentum run, like the momentum you can get off the corner at Eldora because it's got the big banking. This place ain’t that banked and he still was going forward, so I thought, OK, we hit on something tonight.
“And the rest is, don’t jump the cushion, don’t knock on the fence down, don’t wreck.”
Bobby came close to disaster plenty of times, including two hairy situations when he was racing through the top-five. The first came on lap 51 when he made a breathtaking move between Josh Rice and Hudson O’Neal off turn four to vault into third. The other occurred on lap 57 when Pierce plotted a slider underneath the lapped Cory Lawler and second-running Brandon Sheppard in turn three but had to change his line at the last moment and ended up cutting off Sheppard to grab the second spot.
“I told Brandon (afterward), I was like, ‘Hey, sorry, I kind of slid up in front of you, but Lawler did kind of check up there as I was going in for the slider,’ and he was, like, cool with it,” Bobby said. “There was lots of slicing and dicing going on. I made plenty of moves like that even earlier. It’s just nobody started watching me until I was towards the front.”
Pierce assumed command on lap 61 when two-time Show-Me 100 champion Jonathan Davenport, who had led since lap 24 after also pacing the first 17 circuits, slipped over the outside lip of the track in turn two and lost significant speed. Both Pierce and Sheppard sped by.
“I asked him (later), ‘Were you too tight?’ ” said Pierce, who also passed Davenport to take the lead for good on lap 69 on last year’s Show-Me 100. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I was too tight.’ He said he started bottoming out and shoving the nose.
“When that happened, like, I thought he would be able to regroup and get back on the track quick enough. And then he was like, push, push, push, and I was like, ‘Oh!’ And Sheppard’s there (on the bottom) and I had a run and I split those guys, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, come on, no caution, no caution.’ ”
There were two more slowdowns, on laps 83 and 93. Both were for debris; the flotsam on the track that caused the final caution appeared to be a portion of Pierce’s own rear spoiler that was knocked loose from one of his run-ins with the concrete wall in turns three and four as he kept racing on a razor’s edge in the late stages to keep runner-up Sheppard at bay while Davenport finished close behind the Rocket1 driver in third.
Several times Pierce came precariously close to duplicating Davenport’s stumble in turn two but managed to save his car. He had problems at the other of the track as well.
“He really started bottoming out after he got the lead,” Bob Pierce said. “He was busy. He was on the verge of wrecking every lap. That’s why his spoiler’s knocked off, because he jumped the cushion three or four times in three and four.”
Pierce wrestled his machine every lap around the outside lane in turns three and four, which had a different configuration this year because the banking was altered to run right up to the wall rather than flatten out. It proved to be a challenge but one that Pierce mastered.
“They moved the dirt all the way to the wall,” Bobby said. “It's hard to run, though, because, like, the cushion (previously would) stay two car widths off the wall, so now that they moved it to the wall it sort of in a way lost banking when they did that because, you know, they would have had to build onto the walls if they would’ve continued that banking. So it lost banking up there, so it feels really flat up there. And so you get up there, you gotta manhandle that thing just to get the car set right, launch around there.
“So I bobbled a bunch of times, but sometimes when I did, it actually wasn't too bad because then I would still got a good launch off the corner. As long as I got a good launch off the corner, it was OK.”
Pierce beat Sheppard to the finish line by 1.296 seconds, completing yet another performance to build his ever-growing legend. He became the first driver to capture the Show-Me 100 two years in a row since Jimmy Owens in 2012-13 and the fifth driver to capture the race at least three times, joining the late Scott Bloomquist (six), Owens (four), Billy Moyer (three) and Wendell Wallace (three). It was also his 16th career crown jewel victory, continuing his steady climb to all-time great status in the Dirt Late Model division.
There’s no doubt Pierce is a generational talent. Sunday was just more evidence of his sublime ability, another exploit to show that he’s already among the elite drivers in the sport’s history.
“Sometimes I don’t know how he does this s---,” Bob Pierce marveled. “When he gets a mindset like that and he can pull the belts down … I don’t know. He does stuff that that you can’t explain. I don’t know how he learned (to run a cushion) like that or where he learned it from or how he does it, but yeah, that’s saved us a lot.”
Bobby, meanwhile, had no definitive explanation for how he was able to go from zero to hero overnight in one of Dirt Late Model racing’s most prestigious events for the second straight year.
“I don't know what it is,” Bobby said, shrugging his shoulders while discussing the race at his trailer. “My mom (Angie) found a four-leaf clover this weekend, so maybe that’s just what it is.”
