DirtonDirt Dispatches
Dispatches: Sweeping Winger steals Mag finale
Ashton Winger (12) battles with Jake O'Neil (0). (Zack Washington)
Notes and quotes from various Dirt Late Model specials during the June 12-13 (look for Saturday’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series action at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells, W.Va., elsewhere):
Late-race steal
Ashton Winger of Hampton, Ga., was resigned to seeing his bid for a sweep of the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series-sanctioned Clash at the Mag fall one spot short. But suddenly, in the final circuits of Saturday’s 50-lap feature at Magnolia Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss., the race came back to him.
With Jake O’Neil of Tucson, Ariz., losing his firm grip on the lead, Winger seized the moment to snatch victory from defeat and go back-to-back for a $12,000 triumph that made his weekend worth a cool 20-grand.
“I’ll be honest, like Jake was so far gone, I just thought I was going to run second,” Winger conceded afterward. “Then I looked up on the board and there was like five to go, and then I looked and I could see Jake, and then I saw he had a lapped car or too giving him trouble.
“And man, these things are so aerodynamic that, you know, just whenever you get in bad air and (the track’s) rough like that (from afternoon rain), it’s really just all about finding a clean, smooth line.”
Winger, 25, couldn’t stick with O’Neil running the bottom around the 3/8-mile oval. After twice regaining the lead from O’Neil on restarts (laps 18 and 28) and twice giving it back to the low-running Arizona native moments later (laps 21 and 33), Winger figured he would take a runner-up finish and head home.
“I’ll be honest, I was kind of good just running second there,” Winger said. “Then I saw my dad (Gary) signaling and he pointed up but he had his arms apart, and I was like, ‘All right, I got a lead on whoever’s behind me and I need to just round that bottom.’”
But on lap 41 Winger saw Zack Mitchell of Enoree, S.C., who was battling vision problems from a mud-caked helmet visor after earlier mistakenly pulling off all his tearoffs, sail by him on the top to briefly grab second. It woke Winger up to drive harder and, when O’Neil faltered, soon led to an improbable checkered flag.
“Then Zack actually showed me the top there and I really just Hail Mary’d it off into three there just to kind of keep pace with him,” Winger said. “And I was able to halfway pair up with him here enough to get a run to slide them down here in three, and then I was just like, ‘All right, you know, it’s not as rough up here.’
“I mean, around the bottom, Jake was way better than me. I can’t go through them holes. I’m way too tight. When I was able to move out I could just carry my momentum.”
Winger made his winning move on lap 48, overtaking O’Neil to demote the 34-year-old to a disappointing bridesmaid finish.
“I feel really bad for my guys and my sponsors,” said O’Neil, who was seeking his first major touring series victory. “I gave that one away pretty bad.
“The problem with leading is you don’t know where to go, and I kind of figured that top might pack in a little bit, but it’s so rough and I just was hitting my marks in the bottom there. And I think if we don’t have the lapped car (slowing him down), we don’t have a problem.”
A victory would have actually been quite surprising to O’Neil, who initially planned to retire early to save his equipment due to running in difficult conditions.
“I really didn’t intend on staying out there the whole time,” said O’Neil, who works out of Jimmy Owens’s shop in Newport, Tenn. “The track is so rough I didn’t want to tear my equipment up, but we got up through there pretty fast (from the seventh starting spot) and I seen the leader and I was like, ‘Man, I guess we’ll just go out here and see what we can do,’ you know what I mean?
“If you can win $10,000 (actually $12,000), that’ll help replace the $10,000 in damage you did, but we didn’t do that,” he added. “Congrats to Ashton. Man, he did a hell of a job.”
Indeed, Winger earned his fifth career Hunt the Front win.
“I’m wore the hell out,” said Winger, whose third overall triumph of 2026 came one week after he drove his Jeff Mathews-owned Rocket Chassis to a solid eighth-place finish in the Dream finale at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. “That was really demanding.” — From Hunt the Front and staff reports
Just like old times
Is this the 2026 DIRTcar Summer Nationals? Or has the clock been turned back?
Shannon Babb is certainly making this year’s Hell Tour look like a blast from the past.
With a $10,000 victory in Saturday night’s 50-lap series feature at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway, the 52-year-old standout from Moweaqua, Ill., recorded his second win in the first three events of the Summer Nationals. It’s the first time the Hell Tour legend — a four-time champion and the annual circuit’s all-time winningest driver — has started the series 2-for-3 since 2018.
Summer Nationals checkered flags used to come in rapid-fire fashion for Babb, who from 1999-2014 tallied 87 of his 104 career triumphs on the series. Since then he’s backed off his participation in the grueling month-long tour and his victory pace has slowed considerably with 2018 — when he won three of the first four races and five times overall — marking the only year he captured more than three A-mains.
Babb’s milestone 100th career Summer Nationals victory came in 2021 at Farmer City (Ill.) Raceway. He won just twice on the series over the ensuing four years, claiming one feature in ’22 and ’25.
Suddenly he’s winning like the Babb of old with Saturday’s score following his $5,000 success in Tuesday’s 30-lap opener at Illinois’s Brownstown Bullring. And he seems to have a reason for his resurgence identified.
“I just can’t say enough about this race car,” Babb said of the Longhorn Chassis that he purchased last year from superstar Jonathan Davenport’s Double L Motorsports team. “The thing’s fast.”
Babb is thankful for the help his pal Davenport has provided in making the car’s speed show up on the track. Just last week, in fact, Davenport spent his off night during the Dream at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, working as a quasi-crew chief for Babb.
“My hunting buddy’s got me set up pretty damn good right now,” Babb said of Davenport. “I appreciate that.”
Babb wasn’t headed at Fairbury after passing Tanner English of Benton, Ky., for the lead on lap four, but he never had an opportunity to relax. Running the precarious outside lane around the quarter-mile oval, he beat the low-riding English by 0.359 of a second.
“I knew Tanner was probably taking it easy half the race, and the bottom’s really good here so I knew he was going to be tough and he’s probably saving it till 10 to go,” Babb said. “But you know, I thought to myself I could get in the front and then take control of the top.
“I think the top was dominant off of (turn) four … and it just got really treacherous. I started sliding in or I’d push into three. Couldn’t get that down very good, but I could mat it off of two and had a hell of a run down the back straightaway.”
Babb felt right at home — perhaps even a bit like he did during his dominant Summer Nationals days — en route to his sixth career Hell Tour victory at Fairbury and first since 2021. He remarked that a stormy week in the Land of Lincoln helped his cause.
“I guess I like the thunderstorms,” quipped Babb, whose Summer Nationals championships came in 2005, ’06, ’11 and ’14. “Hell, we had tornadoes and 6 inches of rain (seemingly) every night (in the lead-up to Saturday’s action) … I’m pretty good in the mud. I know that. I don’t know how good I am in the slick, but I could definitely hammer the cushion with the best of them.” — From DIRTVision and staff reports
Solid debut
After making West Virginia Motor Speedway the latest track he’s conquered in his first-ever visit, Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., couldn’t have been more complimentary of the shortened 3/8-mile oval in Mineral Wells, W.Va.
The 29-year-old superstar had to battle hard for his $12,000 triumph in Friday’s well-attended 40-lap World of Outlaws Late Model Series feature to kick off the Racefest Summer Championship. It had him bubbling over with enthusiasm in victory lane.
“It’s awesome, man, (winning) in front of this big crowd,” Pierce said. “This hillside’s really cool. I wish more tracks had that (for seating). It’s an awesome view, I’m sure, from up there. I walked it last night and it looked pretty cool. They got some nice backstretch stands too. There's some cool things about this track that I really like.”
That includes the racing itself. Pierce wasn’t really sure what to expect from the track, which owner Mike Hurley reopened last year after reconfiguring it from its sprawling 5/8-mile layout to a more manageable bullring size. Friday marked Pierce's debut at WVMS and the first event there for the WoO circuit since August 2013 when Josh Richards was victorious on a 4/10-mile oval that was the short-lived first attempt to make the speedway smaller.
Pierce said Hurley told him after he arrived on Thursday night that “you kind of gotta get up on the wheel” to circle the new WVMS, “and, you know, yeah, that’s definitely what it was tonight. You had to get up on the wheel and get it done. It was a lot of fun.”
Pierce overtook Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., for the lead on lap 22 but lost it to Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill. — twice — on laps 30 and 32 before coming out on top of the slider battle with the driver of the Rocket1 machine based in Shinnston, W.Va. Then Pierce had to keep the low-running Dennis Erb Jr. of Carpentersville, Ill., at bay over the final circuits to win by 0.681 of a second.
“Had some hellacious racing there between Hudson and Brandon, and Dennis on the bottom there,” Pierce said. “I told Dennis before the race, I said, ‘Hey, this is right down your alley, right?’ And he’s like, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s on the bottom.’ ”
Erb, 53, stuck to the low line to take second from Sheppard on a lap-34 restart and kept Pierce in his crosshairs but couldn’t make a winning move. It was still Erb’s best finish of a frustrating 2026 season that has seen him finish no better than seventh since he recorded two top-five runs in January’s season-opening tripleheader at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla.
“We were just trying to, you know, run the bottom to the middle there, just trying to keep some speed up,” Erb said. “That top was good for them guys to launch off of, so we just had to keep circling there (on the inside) and make good speed. We tried there on a restart, but like I said, there was just a little bit too much up on the top there for them to get going.”
Pierce didn’t think the top was overly dominant, though.
“Towards the end, I think, you probably could have been about anywhere,” Pierce said. “It was a big difference from the heat race and even qualifying. The feature felt a lot like just a slightly bigger Gateway (the fifth-mile indoor track in St. Louis). I was talking about it with Hudson before the race and a couple other drivers … you really got to back it into the corner here to run the top. You’re really back-steering a lot.”
Pierce’s WVMS breakout was his 10th WoO victory of 2026 — giving him four straight seasons with a double-figure win total on the tour — and 15th overall checkered flag of another prolific campaign. He’s now won four straight starts over the past eight days, including a $130,000 sweep of the Dream’s prelim and finale at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, and a $20,000 triumph in Wednesday’s inaugural Shale Crescent Dirt Cup at Muskingum County Speedway in Zanesville, Ohio.
Saturday’s 60-lap, $30,000-to-win Racefest finale will give Pierce a chance to add even more to his bank account.
“Just really excited to race this track tomorrow and come back for other races,” Pierce said. “So they got a good, good racetrack here, and I’m kind of excited to see what happens tomorrow. If the middle comes around, the bottom might be there, top. I don’t know, the corners are so wide, it’s kind of hard to know where to go. You see a guy on the bottom and it kind of wants to make you get down there and I did, and that’s when Brandon passed me (for the lead).” — From DIRTvision and staff reports
Bullring battle
Jason Feger said he hated throwing a slide job to take command of Friday’s DIRTcar Summer Nationals debut at Coles County Speedway. Runner-up Ryan Unzicker hated it, too.
Bloomington, Ill.’s Feger, the two-time and reigning series champion, came alive at halfway, dogged the race-long leader Unzicker in the second half and clinched the win with a lap-35 slider at the tiny track for a $10,000 payday.
“Me and Ryan, we've been battling for years,” Feger said in victory lane. “I hate throwing sliders like that, but hell, it's $10,000-to-win on a little bullring … he would have done the same. We just raced each other so hard but clean at the same time. He’s been really fast all year.”
Unzicker, settling for a runner-up finish after leading 33 of 40 laps, was disappointed in failing to capture his first Summer Nationals victory since 2024.
“When you're leading, it's just hard to figure out where to go, but I don't know. I mean, I pretty well had to lift pretty good there or stick it in the fence, you know, one of the two. So I figured (it was) better off to lift instead of junk my (car),” the El Paso, Ill., driver said. "I just feel a little bit dejected, you know? You lead a lot. My crew’s good and my car’s good. I don't know, just kind of pissed off, really.”
Feger, winning his first series event since July 4, 2025, at Red Hill Raceway in Sumner, Ill., wasn’t in the mix until halfway, then survived frontstretch contact with Billy Moyer before moving up to challenge Unzicker.
"I didn't know if I had a car good enough to win early in the race,” Feger said. “It took off really good, and then it like just kind of stalled out, but I was really good on the restarts, and I just kinda had to keep changing the way I was driving. I got put on that outside on that one restart. I was just trying to be really patient on the bottom and bide my time (figuring) there'd be some late yellows.”
All in all, it worked out for Feger, who loves the tight action.
“Man, we just love bullring racing,” he said. “It’s so awesome." — From DIRTVision and staff reports
Streaming schedule
Among upcoming Dirt Late Model special and sanctioned events available via live streaming:
Friday, June 12
• World of Outlaws-Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series at West Virginia Motor Speedway (DIRTVision)
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at Coles County Speedway in Mattoon, Ill. (DIRTVision)
• Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series at Magnolia Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss. (Hunt the Front TV)
• Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series at Cochran (Ga.) Motor Speedway (ArrowVision Live)
• Selinsgrove Ford Appalachian Mountain Speedweek at Bedford (Pa.) Speedway (FloRacing)
• The Masters Limited Late Models at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis. (Racin Dirt)
• Malvern Bank East Series at Lafayette County Speedway in Darlington, Wis. (RaceON)
• Repairable Vehicles.com Tri-State Late Model Series at Murray County Speedway in Slayton, Minn. (IMCA TV)
Saturday, June 13
• World of Outlaws-Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series at West Virginia Motor Speedway (DIRTVision)
• Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series at Magnolia Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss. (Hunt the Front TV)
• The Masters Limited Late Models at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis. (Racin Dirt)
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway (DIRTVision)
• Save A Lot American Crate All-Star Series at Natural Bridge (Va.) Speedway (Dirt Rich TV)
• Northern Allstars Late Model Series at Lawrenceburg (Ind.) Speedway (Hunt the Front TV)
• Southern All Stars Dirt Racing Series at Senoia (Ga.) Raceway (ArrowVision Live)
• Rogers-Dabbs Crate Racin’ USA 604 Series at Modoc (S.C.) Speedway (Crate Racin’ USA TV)
• Selinsgrove Ford Appalachian Mountain Speedweek at Lincoln Speedway in Abbottstown, Pa. (FloRacing)
• American Crate Late Model Series at RPM Speedway in Crandall, Texas (RaceON)
Sunday, June 14
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at Sycamore Speedway in Maple Park, Ill. (DIRTVision)
Monday, June 15
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at Wilmot (Wis.) Raceway (DIRTVision)
Tuesday, June 16
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at West Liberty (Iowa) Raceway (DIRTVision)
Wednesday, June 17
• DIRTcar Summer Nationals at Davenport (Iowa) Speedway (DIRTVision)
