Lernerville Speedway
Hillbilly engine woes spoil return of Richards
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Josh Richards at Lernerville Speedway. (Jack Reitz)
SARVER, Pa. (Aug. 29) — All the anticipation and excitement of Josh Richards’s return to Dirt Late Model competition lasted … exactly six heat-race laps.
Richards summed up the deflating turn of events after his Rocket1 team car’s engine went up in smoke two circuits away from securing a transfer spot for Friday'a 40-lap Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series Hillbilly Hundred preliminary at Lernerville Speedway. | RaceWire
“Just unfortunate,” Richards said while standing inside the standard-sized enclosed trailer that transported his brand-new machine to the track. “So that’ll be the end of the weekend. We’ll just have to regroup and try again.”
The 37-year-old native of Shinnston, W.Va., understandably was “really bummed” that terminal engine trouble short-circuited his comeback. But he wasn’t alone in his disappointment. His first racing action in nearly three years was highly anticipated, one of the season’s bigger stories considering he was among the sport’s brightest stars during an 18-year run that included five national touring series championships.
Richards’s father Mark, who fielded the Rocket Chassis house car machine that Josh piloted as a teammate to Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., noticed the interest surrounding his son’s participation in the event.
“There were a whole bunch of people standing around the car watching him get in,” Mark said. “They were yelling, ‘Go Josh!’ They were excited to see him.”
Friday was a long time coming for the younger Richards, who walked away from racing after chasing the 2022 World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series with Boom Briggs’s team. He didn’t visit a dirt track at all in 2023, ’24 or this year until he signaled his interest in returning to the seat with a June 16 test session at Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio.
Richards’s natural talent showed through at Sharon as he immediately turned lap times right alongside those clicked off by Sheppard, but he remained silent about a comeback race. He spent the summer going about his new life away from racing, living with his wife, Andrea, in their home in Houston, Ohio, roughly between Dayton and Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, and working as a kitchen designer for Andrea’s parents’ long-running business.
As Labor Day approached, however, Richards had the itch to race. The one event he did have pinpointed to enter was Oct. 3-4’s Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned Pittsburgher 100 at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway in Imperial — the track he calls his favorite — but, with that weekend nearing, he decided “it’d be nice to run somewhere before October” so Lernerville’s Hillbilly Hundred doubleheader was a good tuneup.
“It was kind of last minute to decide to come here,” said Richards, who made his first-ever WoO start at Lernerville as a 16-year-old in 2004 and won the 2013 Firecracker 100 but hadn’t raced at the track since the 2019 Firecracker weekend. “But when I told my dad he was like, ‘All right, we’ll get guys.’ I didn't want to take anything away from them” preparing equipment for Sheppard.
Richards, of course, had access to the Rocket1 crew — Danny White, who was working for the team when Josh left to drive for other owners after the 2016 season, Austin Hargrove and Joel Rogers — but Mark rounded up some other hands to focus on Josh’s entry. Josh’s crew Friday actually boasted experienced and accomplished Dirt Late Model drivers in West Virginians Paul Wilmoth Jr. and Matt Cosner, who were happy to assist Josh’s return.
“These guys did a great job putting everything together to let me come do this and I can’t thank them enough for it,” Richards said. “I appreciate their help.”
The evening started in promising fashion. Richards timed third-fastest in his qualifying group, putting him on the first heat’s front row alongside fast-timer Donald McIntosh of Dawsonville, Ga. Richards hit the track for his first race since November 2022’s World Finales at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C., with some butterflies in his stomach and a focus on integrating himself back into the mix.
“I felt like I did a terrible job in qualifying, but we still had speed,” Richards said. “I was like, ‘All right, just try to figure out where the limit is on the car,’ you know, because with the bodies and everything, they’ve changed a lot with how they race, but at the end of the day, it’s still hard to try to go fast.”
Richards said he “fired off on the first lap and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should go off in there.’ ” He faltered a bit as McIntosh slid into the corner and fell to third after Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., swept into the lead on his way to winning the prelim. On the second lap Richards’s right-rear slipped over the turn-two berm and he lost another spot, but he regained third on a lap-three restart.
Another restart, on lap four, indicated problems to come.
“The motor kind of died and got everyone piled up behind me, but once I got to the bottom and I was protecting, the car felt good,” Richards said. “The motor was kind of dead there for a second (though), so it was giving signs and then it let go (on lap six). It threw a rod out of the motor … it kind of went all at one time.”
With a tell-tale line of oil trailing his car back to the pit area, it was clear Richards’s engine was broken. Putting in another motor from the Rocket1 stable to run Saturday’s $30,000-to-win Hillbilly Hundred finale wasn’t an option, not only because Mark Richards said he has to be careful with his team’s engine program heading into the homestretch of the season but also because cleaning the oil system would complicate a powerplant swap.
So Richards became a spectator. Still wearing his new driver’s uniform, he watched the feature won by Garrett Alberson of Las Cruces, N.M., from the infield near the scales while standing alongside his father.
Running the feature would have provided Richards the track time he craved, but his brief action did get his juices flowing.
“It just felt good to get in a good car and at least have speed where I could have the potential to do well,” Richards said. “I just wanted to be able to run some laps out there. I felt like I was kind of protecting and trying to get to the bottom, and I just wanted to move around on the racetrack, get re-acclimated to the speed.”
Mark Richards pledged that “we’ll get everything back together for him and get him going when he wants to race again.” It appears that will be the Pittsburgher, a race Josh won in 2007 and ’16.
Josh Richards seemed ready for more racing, albeit not so jazzed up that he would think about returning to the grind full time. He’s missed the sport and the speed and he enjoyed being back at the track, but he’s not looking to live and breathe it like he did for so many years.
“It’s one of those things, you know, I love racing,” Richards said. “It's all I’ve ever done, and I just needed to take a break for a little bit. (Life’s) been good. It’s just, the competitive side of me, you know, it’s hard for me to sit still.
“It feels good to be back. There’s a lot of people here, especially at Lernerville, since it’s close to home, a lot of fans that have been coming a long time. It just feels good to see the excitement in everybody. I wish I could go out there and race for them and put on a good show.”
Richards mused that “it really felt like I didn’t miss a day. Other than my rustiness, it just felt like I was just at a race yesterday. Time goes so fast, and the older you get it just goes faster.”
Nevertheless, Richards realizes that he’ll need more laps to make himself as competitive as he’d like to be.
“Just knowing what the car’s going to do and your limits,” he said. “I mean, to compete at this level, to win races at this level, the guys that are good know how far to push it, and know how to take chances and do all that. I mean, for me to just go out in a car and run good laps, I felt like I could do that, but to get back up on that level, again, it’s just something you just got to do.
“We’ll see what happens from here,” he added. “It really hinges on what (Sheppard and the Rocket1 team are) doing. For them, it’s a lot of work and a lot of hassle to take me to go race. So as long as things are going smooth, I think (the Pittsburgher) will happen. Now if they have something come up and they tear a car up or something, we’ll just have to see.”
