Port Royal Speedway
Port Royal drivers have Eldora on their minds
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporterPORT ROYAL, Pa. (Aug. 23) — With Port Royal Speedway the final half-mile on the national touring schedule before Sept. 4-6’s World 100 at Eldora Speedway, many drivers are using this weekend’s Rumble by the River event as a tuneup for the Rossburg, Ohio, crown jewel. | RaceWire
Chris Ferguson’s atop the very list of those striving to dial in their race car before the sport’s most prestigious event. The Mount Holly, N.C., driver and Victory Seats owner is still adjusting to the Stinger Race Car that he’s driven sparingly in 2025.
Two race nights at Port Royal makes for an ideal weekend to test setups, try different lanes and grooves on the racetrack, smooth out a race program’s kinks in dirty air and get more comfortable in the slick — all factors that come into play on Eldora’s high banks.
Ricky Thornton Jr. won Friday’s $10,000 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series opener over Jonathan Davenport and drivers chase a $50,000 payday Saturday.
“You can kind of really take a lot of stuff here and apply it to Eldora,” Ferguson said. “Eldora’s a little more of a circle, but it does slick off. And that's where, the guy's that are really good, like, J.D. is clearly through the middle, like he always is. Ricky was on the top, but you know, I don't have a ton of notes on this car. I have what I got June, you know, at the Dream, which we weren't bad. We were right there.
“But the other tracks, you know, Beckley (Motor Speedway in West Virginia) and even Florence (Speedway in Union, Ky.) — don’t apply to Eldora. So, you can kind of come here and try new stuff.”
Ferguson had to win his B-main just to make Friday’s 40-lapper, but he’s OK with his night starting slow where he qualified 16th of 20 cars in Group A time trials. He “unloaded 180 from where we were and it didn't work,” but that’s because he’s testing through trial and error.
“We kind of knew what we needed to do for the B-main there. Got a little closer, and then threw some stuff at it for the main event,” said Ferguson, who climbed his way to 12th from 17th in the main event before retiring on lap 32. “It worked for a little while, but as soon as the moisture went away, I was no good. But it is good to know that because half the battle at Eldora is when track’s got moisture in it, you got to be able to win a heat race to start up front.
“But I enjoy Port Royal on top of it being a good track to really test stuff. There’s not a lot of places like this. There’s really not. … You could diamond the corner here, you could run the fence, you can on the very inside wall, very similar to Eldora in that sense. So you could really you could kind of strategize how you want to set your car, like, for me, I'm not really up on the cushion anymore like I used to be.
“So I'd rather try to work it out in the middle, cut down a line if I can. You can really test that here. A lot of places, you can’t.”
Garrett Alberson, Michael Leach and Brandon Overton are among drivers bringing new Longhorn Chassis to the Juniata County Fairgrounds this weekend as they attempt to either dial in their new race machines, or at least get a better idea on what car will best suit them for Eldora.
Alberson, who started fifth and finished seventh Friday, says he’s still searching for which car and package to bring to the World 100 in two weeks. As for Leach, the 21-year-old made the trip to Port Royal this weekend for the sole reason of preparing for Eldora’s technical, aero-sensitive nature.
“Yeah, pretty much. There’s not a lot of big half-miles around, none that slick off like this, you know what I mean? It’s about as close to Eldora as you can get. It’s why we came,” said Leach, who started 20th and finished one lap down in 18th on Friday.
Cutting his teeth on smaller black-dirt tracks around his Sun River, Mont., home, Port Royal’s long straightaways and sweeping, banked corners puts Leach out of his comfort zone, just like Eldora.
“This is not my place at all, and it’s why we came. We struggled at Eldora when it slicked off, so this is about as close as you can get,” said Leach, who finished 15th in one of the 25-car B-mains in June’s Dream XXXI. “Whatever you can do to be better at Eldora, you’re gonna wanna do.
“It’s line choice, freaking slowing the car down, race craft, being in a beehive. Just kind of like Eldora. It went a lot of laps green. Getting in a rhythm, just trying to find speed. Racing against guys who are going to be racing at Eldora.”
Friday’s winner Thornton, five-time World 100 winner Davenport and Brandon Sheppard, who’s been on the rise since debuting the XR2 from Rocket Chassis, all feel relatively comfortable with what they’re bringing to Eldora.
“Yeah, for sure,” Sheppard said when asked if there’s anything he and his Rocket1 Racing team are working at Port Royal for Eldora. “But at the same time, the balance of our race car has been good, night in and night out. I think we have a better idea of how we need to go there, how we need to show up there. Super excited for that, too. The car’s been really good on these bigger tracks; small tracks, too.”
Thornton, meanwhile, sees this weekend as an opportunity to make his car more maneuverable overall in dirty air. For him, there’s a handful of crucial events on half-miles coming up this fall beyond the World 100, like Sept. 18-20’s Knoxville Late Model Nationals at Knoxville (Iowa) Raceway, Oct. 3-4’s Pittsburgher at Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh Motor Speedway, and Oct. 11-12’s Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora.
The later two events are especially important because of Lucas Oil’s Big River Steel Chase for the Championship presented by ARP.
“I would say probably the biggest thing, any time you go somewhere big, you work on your car as a group in dirty air,” Thornton said. “When you go to Eldora, there’s a lot of lapped cars and stuff like that. You pray you’re not one of them. I feel like here is a little different than Eldora, but a lot here is the same as Pittsburgh. At the end of the day, Pittsburgh is a huge weekend for us being playoff time. Hopefully we can learn a couple things here tomorrow. We learned a lot tonight. Just open mind coming into here, we changed a couple things on our car trying to get better.
“Obviously we were really good last time we were here (by winning in April). You want to unload that way, but at the same time, everyone’s gotten a lot faster since then. I feel like tires are different now than at the start of the year. Just trying to make the right steps going forward whenever the playoffs really count.”
Drivers like Chris Madden and Mike Marlar made the 1,000-mile, 15-hour tow from last weekend’s Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway to Port Royal this weekend to not only fine-tune their race cars for the upcoming stretch, but because the Pennsylvania half-mile is worth racing at in general.
“I just love racing on this track. It’s an awesome racetrack. … I like what they’ve done here, with the town and the support they have. I like to support good things,” said Marlar, who won Friday’s undercard modified feature along with finishing fifth in the Lucas Oil main event. “And it’s a great track. I’m a fan, too, of this place.”
Should Saturday’s $50,000-to-win main event bring him a satisfying result, Marlar might take next weekend off and deem his program ready for Eldora’s World 100.
This year, he’s been alternating between a Wells Motorsports Infinity Chassis as an “R&D” driver and his “tried-and-true” Longhorn Chassis that won him last September’s Jackson 100 at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway and last month’s World of Outlaws Real American Late Model Series event at Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio.
Last weekend at Batesville, Marlar broke out a brand-new Infinity race car that had “32 things different than their standard car.” This weekend at Port Royal, it’s all about getting his Longhorn dialed in for Eldora.
Marlar emphasized “it’s been fun” serving as a research-and-development driver for the Infinity group, but “sometimes when you come to big races, you need a sure thing, you know?”
“If I go out here and if my car is really good, and if I feel like I’m really right for Eldora, I might just take (next) weekend off,” Marlar said.
Madden, who finished second at last weekend's Topless 100 at Batesville and 10th on Friday after racing the last half of Port Royal’s preliminary feature with a broken throttle spring, says that “not really a whole lot” translates from Port Royal to Eldora for him.
“This place here is just different. I come up here because I like this place. It’s a beautiful place, and it’s a good-paying race,” Madden said. “We wanted to come to see if we can win it.”
But he at least admits that any track time on a bigger track is ideal for bolstering his notebook for his No. 44 Kale Green Motorsports entry.
“Yeah, we’re trying to get us a little notebook built up before Eldora,” Madden said. “Right now, we’re very close to cracking out a few wins. Hopefully we can get it done.”
