Nearly two years since becoming the general manager of Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, Levi Jones is still embedding himself into the Dirt Late Model world. He is, after all, a sprint car guy.

But while his motorsports resume screams “open wheel” — Jones was a standout USAC racer before retiring from driving early, at 33, over a decade ago and transitioning into a management position with the organization and later with IndyCar — he’s not a complete outsider to the full-fender ranks. In fact, his racing roots have more Dirt Late Model tentacles than you’d think. | Complete Dream coverage

“I grew up in Olney, Ill., so it was not sprint car heaven,” Jones said of his hometown in southwest Illinois near the Indiana border. “But I loved sprint cars as a kid. I grew up going to Haubstadt (Indiana’s Tri-State Speedway) on Sunday nights and Late Models and sprint cars raced. (Dirt Late Model starts) Kevin Claycomb and Doug McCammon, all of those guys who ran Haubstadt, were heroes of mine. Right there around us, a lot of guys had Late Models.

“I often think back now, like, why in the hell didn’t I have a Late Model? We could’ve raced a lot more close to us. But I just loved sprint cars and I wanted to be a sprint car driver.”

Jones jokes that ultimately “the reason we got a sprint car was because the garage wasn’t big enough to fit a Late Model,” but he had his sights set on the Hoosier State’s wingless sprint car realm as a teenager rather than his home state’s Dirt Late Model action. It was a good career choice, of course, as Jones, who started racing at the age of 16, went on to win seven USAC national titles (five sprint car, two Silver Crown) in 17 years behind the wheel.

There was just one occasion when Jones drove a Dirt Late Model — in 2006 he was invited to participate in the second Prelude to the Dream at Eldora and finished 13th in the 16-car starting field — but he did gain a tie to the division through marriage to his wife Heidi.

“We always joke, too, Heidi’s dad, Lee Fleetwood, raced Late Models at Brownstown (Indiana), and her dad and uncle had Late Models forever,” Jones said. “She is Dirt Late Model to the core. We’ve got it from both sides in our house.”

Now Jones, who turns 44 on June 10, straddles the line between open wheel and Dirt Late Model competition as the day-to-day leader at Eldora, the famed half-mile oval in western Ohio. It’s especially true this week as Dirt Late Models take center stage with the 32nd running of the Dream, a $100,000-to-win extravaganza that kicks off Wednesday with a separate FloRacing Night in America event.

Learning the intricacies of the Dirt Late Model class has been part of the learning process as Eldora’s GM for Jones, who took the post in September 2024, but it’s a challenge he’s relished. Jones wouldn’t have accepted the job offer from Eldora owner Tony Stewart — his former car owner for six of his USAC titles — if he didn’t think he could come to understand how the Dirt Late Model division rolls like he does with sprint cars.

“It’s incredible,” Jones said of Dirt Late Model racing. “The competition, the amount of teams and car owners and drivers and how they operate, there’s so many teams at an elite level. I mean, it’s not a, ‘Hey, I’m using this to get somewhere else.’ This is it, right? The whole world revolves around their race team, those events, and that translates to the fans of Dirt Late Model racing. They’re as committed and dedicated to their guys as anything I’ve ever seen.”

The primary connection Jones has with the Dirt Late Model community is his shared love of Eldora. It’s an attribute that’s evident in every breath Jones takes. It’s why running Eldora is a dream job for Jones, who after retiring from driving in 2013 spent 2015-21 as USAC’s national series director and executive vice president and from 2021-24 served as the director of Indy NXT, the main development series for IndyCar.

“I can remember one of the very first stories that someone did with me (as a driver) that was in (National) Speed Sport News,” Jones said. “I hadn’t won a USAC race at that point, and they asked me, ‘If you could win a USAC race, where would it be?’ Well, the answer in, you know, 1999 is the same as it would be today for me. It’s Eldora Speedway, right?

“I try to share that sentiment with the staff here, that when drivers and teams come to Eldora, whether you’re coming in from the east on North Star Fort Loramie Road or coming on (Route) 118, when you get close to Eldora, your blood pressure’s a little higher, your heart beats a little faster. If it’s the beginning of the year, you’re trying to win to make a statement. If it’s later in the year, you’re trying to have a good run to keep your job or you’re trying to win to pay off the bills you’ve overspent over the summer.

“All those things come into play at Eldora, because, you know, the lights are a little bit brighter, the chance to win big money is there, and the chance is there to put your name in the record books that live forever,” he continued. “It’s all served up on a plate right there at Eldora Speedway, and the fans are there and you can’t replace that history or make it up at a different event. It’s easy to get caught up in all of that at Eldora.”

Jones knows what a driver — open wheel or Dirt Late Model — is feeling when they’re at Eldora, from the pressure to the supreme challenge of negotiating the high-banked track to the thrill of victory. He’s experienced it all.

“It’s so hard or next to impossible to back into a win at Eldora,” Jones said. “I mean, circumstances can play out, but these events, you have to put yourself in position. So, OK, maybe you realistically should have ran third or fourth and end up winning because of how something played out, but, you know, let’s face it, you had to put yourself in that position first. Backing into one is impossible.

“Burning the fence down at Eldora, the margin for mistake is very much smaller than 99 percent of the other places you go in the country, so that makes it cool. And then to get right down to it, your peers know that when you win at Eldora, you were the badass that day.”

Jones won twice at Eldora — USAC sprint car features during the Four Crown Nationals in 2005 and ’10 — while also experiencing “tons of heartbreak.”

“I think about it, right at the end of my career and Kyle Larson's big night at the Four Crown, right?” Jones said, referring to Larson’s sweep of the sprint car, Silver Crown and midget features at the 2011 Four Crown Nationals. “It’s the event that he says propelled him on, and NASCAR owners are talking to him, right? I had the sprint car race handled easily, and on a restart there was a piece of nerf bar in the cushion and cut my tire down. Boom. We’re out.

“And I’m on the pole of the Silver Crown race. I lead a couple laps, Kyle Larson slides me, I run second. I can’t catch him. Try my damnedest, but that’s just how the place is. I really wanted to win both of those races that year and, yeah, one of the greatest ever is there and puts it on me.”

Knowing the accentuated joy and pain of racing at Eldora makes Jones uniquely suited to overseeing Eldora’s operation. Stewart and his longtime business parter, Brett Frood, realized that when they opened discussions about the job with Jones in the wake of the sudden death of previous Eldora GM Jerry Gappen in May 2024.

When the Eldora offer came, Jones was working for IndyCar while living with his wife and their children in an Airbnb on Main Street in Speedway, Ind., as their new house was being built in Plainfield, Ind. He accepted the Eldora position “five days before we closed on our new house” so they never moved into it, but Jones’s wife was all for him making the career change.

“To quote my wife, who very rarely cusses unless it’s something I’ve really screwed up, I talked to her about it, told her that (Stewart and Frood) called and that it was really intriguing to me and I was really thinking about it,” Jones aid. “And she said, ‘Well, s---, why wouldn’t you do that? That’s what you love. That’s what you want to do.’

“And the people at Eldora, right? I mean, you know, that was one of my first questions: Hey, who’s leaving, right? Who’s staying there? I think as long as they all felt like someone that was coming in could help them do what they needed to do, they’d be there, and fortunately that’s been the case.”

Jones has thrown himself into his lead role at Eldora, striving to see the sport from every angle.

“I have to look at it from the racetrack side now, from the promoting side of it,” Jones said. “But any decision, you have to look at it from, in my view, three parts. Is it safer? Does it make the racing better? What’s the financial impact? You can’t make a decision based solely on the teams and competitors or solely on the fans or solely what’s best for the tracks. You have to take a little bit of that information and decide how it affects those three groups, you know, in total.

“I have been around long enough to know that when you only worry about what the track’s best interest is, it usually doesn’t end well. And if you worry only what the teams and drivers need, it can blow up in a heartbeat. And if you only worry about what the fans need, well, then you’re in trouble, too. So it’s a balance. It’s an every day juggle of how you make that all mesh.

“These big races, we hope to have 100 cars at the Dream and I hope to have 100 at the World (100), right?” he added. “Of all those 100, not one of them have asked, ‘Hey, what can I do to help you sell more tickets,’ or, ‘How many tickets have you sold?’ You know, they want to know, ‘Well, how much is it paying? Why are the rules messed up? And why aren’t you doing this or that?’ So, OK … and then every ticket we sell at the office, nobody asks, ‘Hey, what tire are you running?’ So, you know, the questions you get from both sides are totally different, but I understand that it takes both sides to make the event happen.”

Jones experiences Eldora these days in a way that few others do. He now resides with his family in the brick ranch house on the corner of Route 118 and North Star Fort Loramie Road, the home that late Eldora founder Earl Baltes’s daughter and son-in-law lived in before relocating to the house Baltes built off the track’s second turn. He’s just “750 feet” away from the track.

“I live right there so I look outside and nobody’s around, and then, boom, all of a sudden in a couple days, I’ve got thousands of my closest friends right here,” Jones said. “The place turns into the largest city from Greenville all the way to the Michigan line basically overnight, and then Sunday afternoon, you’re back out there with the track and everything in nature again. That’s it.

“It is really cool to kind of be there and go through that transition of how it all builds up to the green and the checkered on Saturday night and then it all kind of drifts away and then we get all dressed up to do it again.

“You can’t really explain it,” he continued. “I mean, even last night, (the track crew) watered again last night at 8 o’clock, right? So the sun’s going down. Nobody’s there. You’re out there kind of in a surreal moment of, ‘Hey, this is preparation for a really cool event.’ ”

Jones said he does notice a difference between the atmospheres of Eldora’s major sprint car and Dirt Late Model events. He quipped with a laugh that “the World 100 has a few more people than the Kings Royal (winged sprint car race), but the sheriff’s department gets a little more alert during the Kings Royal than the World 100 — however you want to take that.”

But in the final analysis, Jones is one of the first to assert there are more similarities than differences between the two main racing disciplines featured at Eldora. And whether he’s a sprint car or Dirt Late Model guy doesn’t really matter as long as he works hard to have “a complete understanding of really what’s going on.”

“I’m an old guy now, right?” Jones said. “I remind the track crew guys, like, we talk about the pit rules and stuff that Earl (Baltes) had. I’m like, ‘Hey, you guys do understand about 99 percent of the crew guys on these teams now, they probably weren’t even born when Tony bought the track, so they don’t know don’t know the unwritten rules form Earl to today.’ You have to understand that.

“And then those guys, they don’t need to know that I ever won a race in a sprint car at Eldora or what I did. I mean, it’s about what I can do for them right now, and I want to have the biggest and best event at Eldora.”

Jones paused. He chuckled and recalled a moment he had last year with two-time World 100 winner Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., to demonstrate that his sprint car background doesn’t define him as Eldora’s GM.

“It was funny last year,” Jones said. “I think it was the Dream. Bobby Pierce, with (now wife) Abby (a Miss Eldora Speedway), they were leaving, and Bobby was like, ‘Oh, man, hey, I didn’t even realize you raced sprint cars. I didn’t really follow it. I’m like, ‘Bobby, it’s fine. I don’t need you to know, right?’

“My saying is, ‘Time marches on.’ I’m just thrilled to be in the position I’m in to kind of keep the ball or keep the can rolling down the road here in Eldora. It doesn’t need my stamp or that part of the thing. I’m here to try to carry on Earl’s dedication and vision and then Tony’s passion and support to what Eldora is and just keep it going.”