In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):

No. 1: Seeing Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., show up at Salina (Okla.) Highbanks Speedway for the weekend’s Midwest LateModel Racing Association doubleheader was a bit random, but it’s also how he’s operating as an independent driver this season. He wanted to check out the track so he did — and he swept the pair of 30-lappers, making the trip to a 3/8-mile oval he called a “super nice place” worth a cool $15,000. He also enjoyed a postrace dinner on Friday unlike any he’s ever had when he visited the Finishline Bar & Grill steakhouse that’s located in the track’s tower. “I mean it’s like a legit nice restaurant,” related Davenport, who asserted it certainly wasn’t a place that offered $2 steaks. “I’d give it a 9. Table-style salad and bread sticks like Olive Garden. Sides was good. Got shrimp cocktail for an appetizer. And all after the races after we got loaded up.”

No. 2: When Davenport posed for pictures in victory lane following his $10,000 triumph in Saturday’s MLRA finale at Salina, the oversized novelty check he held didn’t have his name written on it. Instead it read “Cherry Picker,” a reference to some critics who have disparaged him for deciding to enter a few regional events this season since he’s not locked into chasing a national tour. He said MLRA officials were “just joking around about it” with him and he good-naturedly played along with the barb, noting that before the race “they actually asked me if I’d be mad if they did it.”

No. 3: The 42-year-old Davenport’s visit to Salina kicked off a two-week trek that will take him and his Double L Motorsports team to eight races over the next 13 days across the Upper Midwest with the World of Outlaws Late Model Series. Five tracks are new to him — Minnesota’s Ogilvie, I-94 EMR and Norman County and North Dakota’s River Cities and Nodak — with only July 2-4’s swing-ending NAPA Gopher 50 tripleheader at Deer Creek Speedway in Spring Valley, Minn., coming on familiar territory. He said this type of stretch is exactly “what I had in mind when doing things differently this year.”

No. 4: Tyler Kuykendall of Warsaw, Mo., experienced a strange moment en route to his eighth-place finish in Saturday’s MLRA feature at Salnia. Just as a caution flag was displayed a left-rear spring from another car was kicked up in the air and into the driver’s-side window of the 18-year-old’s machine. The spring stuck to the edge of Kuykendall’s roof, so he had to pull it off during the caution period and then drive near the inner edge of the track to throw it toward the infield for an official to retrieve. The strange episode was captured by an Go-Pro camera in Kuykendall’s cockpit and the video was posted on his Facebook page.

No. 5: The last time a national Dirt Late Model tour visited 141 Speedway in Francis Creek, Wis. — May 18, 2018, for a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event — winner Earl Pearson Jr. of Jacksonville, Fla., heeded the local fans’ call to follow tradition and take a celebratory dive into the track’s infield pond. So not surprisingly, after Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., captured Saturday’s $25,000 WoO feature, he received the same encouragement from the crowd. The 29-year-old Pierce obliged and jumped in, producing an awesome celebration photo by WoO photographer Emily Schwanke. It wasn’t the first racetrack pond-swim for Pierce, who made a similar postrace dive into the infield pond at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis., after winning the 2024 USA Nationals. (And by the way, Pierce finished second to Pearson in the 2018 Lucas Oil Series A-main at 141, leading until late in the distance while driving for Dunn Benson Motorsports.)