Rising star Sheppard caps best-ever season
By Kevin Kovac
UMP DIRTcar
Brandon Sheppard
Brandon Sheppard came of age in 2012. In 2013, he became a star.
After bursting onto the national dirt Late Model scene in ’12 during his stint driving the Rocket Chassis house car, the 20-year-old driver from New Berlin, Ill., returned to his family-owned team this season and promptly made UMP DIRTcar history. He captured the Summernationals and weekly championships, becoming the youngest racer to win each title and just the fourth to sweep both points crowns in the same season.
For a driver who hails from the heart of UMP DIRTcar country and grew up watching his father, Steve Sheppard Jr., race a Dirt Late Model across the Midwest, grabbing the circuit’s two biggest prizes is an accomplishment to savor.
“It feels awesome,” said Sheppard, who joined Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill. (2012), Dennis Erb Jr. of Carpentersville, Ind. (2007-08) and John Gill of Mitchell, Ind. (1986) on the short list of drivers with Summer Nationals/weekly title sweeps. “UMP is the big thing around us — has been since I was little kid, really. I’ve been around it my whole life, so it’s real special for me personally to win both championships.
“We’ve been working really hard for a lot of years to get where we’re at right now and it was a long season, but it was all worth it.”
The stage was set for Sheppard’s spectacular campaign in the spring of 2012 when he made headlines as Rocket Chassis house car owner Mark Richards’s hand-picked replacement for his son, World of Outlaws Late Model Series star Josh Richards, who left the dirt-track wars to pursue a pavement career with a NASCAR Nationwide Series ride. Sheppard steered Richards’s familiar blue No. 1 to just a single Summer Nationals feature last year and finished a distant third in the points standings, but he posted plenty of head-turning outings throughout the season (including his first-ever WoO triumph) and, perhaps most important, received an education from an established team that put him in position for future success.
Indeed, when Sheppard was pushed back to driving his family’s Rocket No. b5 machines this season by Josh Richards’s return to dirt racing, he had a new perspective.
“Mark and his guys taking me in did so much for me career,” said Sheppard, who not only drove the Rocket house car but also worked on the team’s equipment at their shop in Shinnston, W.Va. “They really helped me set my whole program up the right way. My hauler and stuff might not be as clean and tidy as theirs is because I don’t have as much help as they do, but as far as my car and my whole program — well, it’s on a whole other level now because of what I learned from them. Preparation, maintenance — all that is where it needs to be now.”
Sheppard used all the lessons learned during his march to the championship on the grueling Summernationals series, which featured 26 races at 25 tracks in eight states over a 39-day period in June and July. He bagged four victories (Spoon River Speedway and Belle-Clair Speedway in Illinois, and Clarksville Speedway and Clay Hill Motorsports Park in Tennessee) and used his consistent performances (19 top-five and 23 top-10 finishes) to win the title by 75 points (1,675-1,600) over 16-year-old Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill.
Clinching the $25,000 Hell Tour crown brought a sense of accomplishment to Sheppard, who began traveling the circuit with his father before even reaching high school and has been a fixture in Summernationals fields for most of his seven years behind the wheel.
“My dad worked hard a lot of years trying to win it and he was never able to,” Sheppard said. “I guess me winning it kind of fulfilled both of our dreams. I was always there when he was doing it and he’s there helping me now, so it meant a lot to both of us.”
Despite the joy that accompanied the Hell Tour title, Sheppard and his crew barely paused to celebrate. Even with fatigue overtaking them upon completion of the Summernationals on July 20 at Oakshade Raceway in Wauseon, Ohio, there was no time for a break.
“Honestly, after the last night at Oakshade, we were like, ‘Well, I guess we gotta load up and go to Quincy (Ill.) on Sunday so we can start running for national (DIRTcar UMP weekly) points,’” said Sheppard. “Summernationals kind of put me in position to go for the national deal, so we decided to keep going and do as many nights as we could. It was never-ending this year.”
With Sheppard in the driver’s seat for the circuit’s national weekly-racing points crown after the Hell Tour, he threw his focus into chasing that honor for the first time. Twenty-eight of his 86 UMP DIRTcar starts came during the two-plus months of racing following the Summernationals. With a driver’s best 35 finishes used to determine the weekly champ, he had the volume of race appearances necessary to ensure his worst runs of the season were scratched from his ledger.
While Pierce made a late push to close the gap, Sheppard beat his teenage rival for the $20,000 national title by 47 points (2,549-2,502). On the strength of a season that saw him lead UMP DIRTcar’s ranks with 14 victories (at nine tracks) and record 47 top-five and 66 top-10 finishes, B-Shepp found himself standing as a national champ before even reaching the legal drinking age.
“In the beginning, you never think you’d do something like win a national championship that young,” Sheppard said. “But we’ve been improving as a team and I’ve been improving as a driver every year. I can see myself getting better every year, driving harder and driving better. It all came together this year.”
When the 2013 DIRTcar UMP awards banquet is held on Jan. 11 in Springfield, Ill., Sheppard’s total earnings for his championships and other awards will near the $50,000 mark. Thrown in the $50,000 first-place check he collected for winning the prestigious 100-lap Dirt Track World Championship event Oct. 19 at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park in a return engagement with the Rocket Chassis house car team, and it’s clear that Sheppard has become one of Dirt Late Model racing’s titans.
