Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: One-off start suits Lanigan's appetite
I had a feels-like-old-times moment during last month’s Firecracker 100 weekend at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa.
Well, sort of.
At the end of the event’s June 27 finale, I walked up to talk to Darrell Lanigan. It was a postrace visit I’ve made on many previous occasions over more than two decades covering Dirt Late Model racing, but this time it was quite different. I wasn’t there to interview Lanigan about a victory, up-front finish or a frustrating dropout. This time I stopped by his pit stall just to catch up a little after he had completed his first competitive start in nearly two years — and in a Crate Late Model show, no less.
Driving a No. 58TAZ machine fielded by western Pennsylvanian Joe Zulisky, Lanigan, 56, of Union, Ky., ended an absence from the cockpit stretching back to a fourth-place run piloting his buddy Mark Garrison’s Super Late Model in a weekly feature on July 13, 2024, at his hometown’s Florence Speedway. It was far from a memorable return as he was an early retiree from 50-lap RUSH-sanctioned Bill Emig Memorial, but he enjoyed the opportunity.
“I’ve been wanting to do it again,” Lanigan told me. “Joe, he actually bought a truck off of me and he’s been bugging me to come up here and drive his Crate, so I said, ‘What the hell? I’ll come up.’
“I wasn’t expecting a lot. I mean, I’ve been out of the car for two years, so just trying to get my feet wet again. But I had a good time. I got to come out, hang with my buddies and just have a little fun.”
Lanigan’s appearance certainly provided me some nostalgia. Lanigan, after all, is among the drivers whom I’ve interviewed, and seen win, most often during by Dirt Late Model writing career.
I witnessed Lanigan win for the first time on July 23, 2004 — his first-ever World of Outlaws Late Model Series triumph, by the way — when I covered the reincarnated national tour’s stop at Potomac Speedway in Budds Creek, Md., while working full-time for Trenton, N.J.-based Area Auto Racing News. One year later I covered another Lanigan WoO victory at Delaware International Speedway in Delmar, and the year after that I became the public relations director for the WoO Late Model circuit, which meant I would become very familiar with Lanigan and his No. 29 entries.
From mid-2006 through Speedweeks 2014, I traveled up-and-down the WoO road. Lanigan was a mainstay of the tour for that entire time. I saw his always-shining black rig at every racetrack we visited — and many places in between — and I watched as he blossomed into one of the most prolific winners in series history.
Looking back now, it’s quite amazing how many times Lanigan reached victory lane in front of me. Give or take a race or two, I’m pretty sure I was on the scene for 58 of Lanigan’s 74 career WoO triumphs, including eight after I left the WoO post in the spring of 2014 and began working for DirtonDirt. I saw him win WoO features at 38 tracks in 19 states and three Canadian provinces — basically all over the map.
I was there for all of Lanigan’s WoO record six-race win streak in July and August of 2012, a stretch highlighted by his first USA Nationals victory at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis. I went in-depth with him for feature stories on his WoO championships in 2008, ’12 and ’14.
Away from the WoO circuit, I covered probably a dozen other Lanigan victories. The 2006 UMP DIRTcar Fall Nationals at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. A World 100 prelim in 2013. Dream prelims in ’17, ’18 and ’19. A couple Wild West Shootout checkered flags in 2015 at USA Raceway in Tucson, Ariz. A 2018 Dirt Million prelim at Mansfield (Ohio) Speedway.
That’s about 70 times in all that I’ve interviewed Lanigan after a win. Aside from Josh Richards, I’m not sure I’ve seen a Dirt Late Model driver win more races in person. I’ve covered a ton of victories by such drivers as Bobby Pierce, Jonathan Davenport, Scott Bloomquist, Billy Moyer, Jimmy Owens, Brandon Sheppard and Tim McCreadie (there’s also a bunch of Northeast modified wins with T-Mac), but it would be hard to top Lanigan.
I have to admit that Lanigan winning so often — especially when he would rip off victories in succession like in ’12 — challenged the writer in me. Lanigan has never been viewed as the most colorful, introspective driver to interview. He’s not the guy who a reporter can expect to get a unique story from no matter how mundane and uneventful his drive to victory was. Lanigan was certainly an excitable winner, but he has always been a racer who let his performance do most of the talking, which made me, as a journalist, sometimes have to really pull stuff out of him to create an intriguing story.
Not that I haven’t had good interviews with Lanigan. I feel like I was able to get him talking the more I came to know him, though by no means would he land on an all-interview team of Dirt Late Model drivers.
What I did realize about Lanigan from so spending many years in close proximity to him was his inner fire and attention to detail. I witnessed his intensity several times. I’ll never forget opening the WoO hauler’s door the night Lanigan disagreed with a call at Screven Motor Speedway in Sylvania, Ga., and seeing Lanigan, sitting on a seat in the rig across from then series race director Bret Emrick, with a look in his eyes that made me immediately close the door — and feel sorry for the wrath that Emrick was facing. There was that year during the DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., when on-track scrapes with Josh Richards led to Lanigan having a falling out with Josh’s father — his good buddy Mark Richards — and leaving the track with his hauler before returning the next day and parking in the lower Gator Pond rather than alongside Rocket Chassis house car trailer. I also will always recall the agonizing frustration Lanigan displayed after his four runner-up finishes in the Firecracker 100 that came before he finally broke through to win the event in 2014.
The way Lanigan operated his race team, too, was notable. His hauler and trailer, along with his shop, was always immaculate. His cars were always sparkling clean and sported straight body panels. There was nothing half-assed, ever, about Lanigan’s effort. He was all in.
That’s what stuck out to me when I spoke to Lanigan at Lernerville, my first time chatting with him (aside from a text here-and-there) since we crossed paths at Florence’s North-South 100 a couple years ago. He made it clear that he’s no longer carrying that burning desire to race, that single-mindedness that propelled him for so many years from his first years on the Dirt Late Model scene in the early ‘90s to his long run as a national touring series regular.
“If you want to competitive, you gotta put your whole life into it,” Lanigan said. “Nowadays, like if you race, you gotta do it 100 percent. I mean, you gotta put your mind in hard to live racing if you want to be competitive. And like I said, I don’t have that time commitment. And I’m not 24 years old no more.”
Lanigan, of course, raced full-time until he was 50. He was a WoO regular from 2004 until stepping off the tour during the ’15 campaign, then chased the Lucas Late Model Dirt Series driving for NASCAR racer Clint Bowyer’s team from 2016-18. He returned to the WoO trail in ’19 with his own program and ran the series in ’20 for Shawn Martin’s Viper Motorsports before splitting with Martin in April 2021 after a slow start to the WoO season.
Following the Viper breakup, Lanigan progressively slowed his racing activity to where it’s now indeed just a trickle, if it can be considered even that. A decorated competitor whose resume includes five crown jewel wins (2003 Dream and Dirt Track World Champions, ’13 Knoxville Nationals, ’14 USA Nationals and Firecracker 100), his last Super Late Model victory came on May 30, 2021, in the Sunoco American Late Model Series-sanctioned Johnny Appleseed Classic at Eldora driving a car fielded by Mississippi’s Randy Thompson. His last win of any kind was on June 3, 2023, when he captured a $10,000 unsanctioned 604 Crate Late Model feature at Latrobe (Pa.) Speedway piloting a Dirk Neal-owned Daugherty Motorsports machine.
There is no race hauler or race cars remaining in Lanigan’s shop at his home just down the road from Florence Speedway. He’s also been divested of his Club 29 Race Cars chassis business since ending its operation in 2019.
I asked Lanigan how it feels to be out of the racing game.
“Oh, it’s lot less stressful,” Lanigan said. “It’s just so much stress when you race. I mean, most of it you put on yourself to do good, but everybody expected you to do good, so when you came there, like you wanted to do good, you know what I'm saying? And that just put extra pressure on you to do good.”
The 2021 National Dirt Late Model Hall of Fame inductee still enjoys watching the live streams of races and occasionally takes in a race at Florence or elsewhere — in February, for instance, he spent some time in Florida on Lake Okeechobee with his buddy Boom Briggs and attended the WoO doubleheader at Hendry County Motorsports Park in Clewiston, Fla. — but he doesn’t have a desire to race on any more than an occasional basis.
Lanigan is staying busy building his Darrell Lanigan Trucking company, which he launched four years ago and now counts eight dump trucks in his fleet.
“It’s doing very good,” said Lanigan, who sometimes will jump behind the wheel of a truck himself if necessary. “I’m picking up new contracts and stuff like that, getting more trucks, getting more drivers. It’s a full-time job there. That’s why I told somebody today — there’s no way I could race and try to run my trucking company. There’s not enough time.”
Lanigan’s free time these days — and, he expects, well into the future — is being filled with his newfound life as a grandfather. Yes, he now has two grandsons: his oldest daughter, 25-year-old Tiffany, the mother of 18-month-old Charleston and his middle daughter Brittany, 21, delivering Kohen five months ago. (He also has a 13-year-old daughter, Liala.)
“I like hanging with them,” Lanigan said. “They came up (to Lernerville) and watched me, so it was kind of cool. It’s the first time they’ve seen me race.”
Lanigan is diving right into role as a grandfather.
“It’s awesome,” Lanigan said. “There’s no better word than Grandpa. Well, they’re not really talking yet, but there won’t be no better word than Grandpa.”
Papaw Lanigan — as he’ll be called once the tykes start chatting him up — also doesn’t deny that he can envision a couple future racers in his grandkids. He wouldn’t mind bringing the Lanigan No. 29 back for them.
“Oh, I wouldn’t push them to it,” he said when asked about the possibility of his grandchildren getting into racing, “but I wouldn’t say no.”
