Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Alberson ready to tackle new challenge
Garrett Alberson completely understands the opportunity he’s been handed this year.
Chasing the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series full-time? It’s an absolute dream come true for a 33-year-old racer from the off-the-beaten-Late-Model-path outpost of Las Cruces, N.M.
“Oh, it’s huge,” Alberson said when asked to describe how it feels to be a national touring series rookie. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t know if there’s anybody who races Late Models that hasn’t wanted to do something like this.”
While Alberson noted towards the end of last month’s Georgia-Florida Speedweeks that tackling the Lucas Oil Series with Roberts Motorsports has “already shown to be a huge challenge,” the early-season trials and tribulations (a modest two top-10 finishes in 13 Speedweeks starts at four tracks he’d never previously circled) haven’t dulled his enthusiasm. He’s soaking up every detail of his new, ambitious endeavor, a giant step up to Dirt Late Model racing’s highest level in his third year driving for veteran car owner Ken Roberts of East Moline, Ill. — a national tour first-timer himself — that comes just a couple years removed from the end of his stint as crew chief for four-time Lucas Oil Series champion Earl Pearson Jr. and the Black Diamond house car effort.
“You’re gonna have your nights where you just feel like you don’t know what you’re doing,” Alberson said of the fate faced by a Lucas Oil Series newcomer. “But I think that’s why you do it. You try to better yourself and try to be one of the guys who you’ve always watched.
“That’s one thing that I learned from being around Earl — that those (touring) guys really are that good and it’s from all the time they’ve put in.”
Alberson, of course, has taken a rather unlikely path to his current situation. Dirt Late Models weren’t really a thing around his boyhood home in New Mexico, but somehow he became infatuated with the division at a young age.
“It’s pretty crazy really, because there really wasn’t a whole lot of Late Model racing in Las Cruces,” Alberson related. “It seemed like there was some in Arizona (a drive of 4-plus hours to the west), always a decent regional Late Model deal going on over there, but only like once a year would Late Models come into town.
“But I always liked ’em. We had sprint cars and mods (at tracks around Las Cruces) all the time, but I was always a Late Model guy when I was a kid. I guess anytime something came on TV … I remember being in elementary school and knowing (the) Hav-A-Tampa (Series), knowing what that was. Maybe I didn’t know all the guys — I wasn’t paying attention close enough yet — but I knew that’s where Late Model racing was at.”
Alberson began racing super trucks locally, at tracks like Southern New Mexico Speedway and Texas’s El Paso Speedway Park, as a teenager. A relationship he developed with one of his fellow competitors, Dave Deetz, a podiatrist from Las Cruces, introduced him to Late Model action.
“I’d been to his shop and worked out of his shop here-and-there, and he had this old Late Model sitting out in the weeds from like the ’90s when he raced in Arizona,” Alberson said of Deetz. “Through whatever circumstances, he ended up parking it and it sat in the weeds for years. Then around 2010 he came to me and said, ‘Hey, I saw this flyer about a race in Arizona and I want to put this car together.’
“I didn’t really know anything (about the Late Model event). I had been disconnected from the Late Model world, so I’m just thinking, ‘Hey, it’s just some race in Arizona. We’ll just throw this car together and go try it.’ It ends up being the Wild West Shootout (in January 2011 at Tucson’s USA Raceway), and we show up with this car from 1992 … I think it was an old Bullit Chassis, a (Ray) Callahan car.
“So we started from scratch (with Alberson making his Late Model debut at the Wild West Shootout), and we got our asses handed to us,” he continued. “We were happy to finish a B-main, one of them deals.”
Alberson’s Late Model career was off and running.
“For some reason,” Alberson said, “I was not smart enough to give up, or Dave wasn’t — one of the two — and we just kind of stayed at it.”
Remaining based in Las Cruces wasn’t an option for a driver hoping to make it in the Dirt Late Model world, so Alberson and his now wife, Dani, knew they would have to go to a more suitable location for him to pursue his racing career. They made their first move in 2014, to Shreveport, La., where Alberson took a job working at Ronnie Stuckey’s Black Diamond Race Cars. He initially raced regionally in Deetz-owned cars but in 2015 landed a ride with Louisiana’s Raymond Childress, who expanded Alberson’s horizons with some trips outside the area before Childress shut down his operation in ’17.
Left without a regular deal to race, Alberson shifted gears and spent the 2018-19 seasons traveling the Lucas Oil Series as the head wrench of his boss Stuckey’s Black Diamond house car team. He made a handful of starts during his two seasons as a mechanic, but his main priority was trying to make Pearson go fast. In some sense, Alberson became like a backup NFL quarterback, wanting to compete but realizing he must gain experience from the sidelines as he waited for his turn.
“There’s definitely elements of that,” Alberson said when asked about the backup QB analogy. “I mean, there are things that were learned in that time period that I probably wouldn’t have learned just beating up-and-down the road (racing) in our area.
“It’s definitely tough (to be a racer and not race). But I think the cool thing was, being around Earl, and knowing that he was in that caliber of guys that I’d never been able to outrun, you just, like, have to try and set your ego aside and be like, ‘This is what I need to learn from.’ And that was also my job, so I had to do my job good.”
Alberson’s desire to climb back behind the wheel on a regular basis, though, became stronger as time passed.
“After a couple years, you’re like, ‘OK, this is enough. I gotta get back to racing this thing a little bit,‘” Alberson said. “At my age you start thinking about stuff like that. You’re like, you’ve only got so many years to try it and it takes a lot of years to get good at it.”
So after working with Pearson and the Black Diamond team at Speedweeks 2020, Alberson decided to take a leap of faith and plunge back into the driving side of the sport. He had become close to Roberts as one of the car owner’s go-to guys for technical advice at Black Diamond, and Roberts, who was fielding equipment for Jeremiah Hurst of Dubuque, Iowa, tried to arrange a Wisconsin-based ride opportunity for his young friend. That deal fell through, however, following the March 2020 outbreak of Covid-19, so Roberts, who was in the midst of building an open-motor program with Hurst after focusing on IMCA-sanctioned spec-engine competition, offered to let Alberson race as a teammate to Hurst if he would come north to work on the team’s equipment housed at Hurst’s parents’ shop.
Since Alberson and his wife “always have a bathroom bag ready to go” if an opportunity presents itself, they relocated to an apartment in Dubuque, Iowa, and Alberson made his debut in a second Roberts car in June 2020.
“That’s one thing cool about my wife and I — we’ve always looked at it as, if we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna go all in,” Alberson said. “That’s the way we’ve always approached it. We’ve purposely chosen to live in a way that would allow us to do that (Dani has a job that allows her to work remotely). We’ve sacrificed some things, but it’s allowed us to do what we want to do.”
Roberts’s two-pronged attack clicked over the second half of the 2020 campaign. Most notably, Hurst won the Lucas Oil Midwest LateModel Association championship and Alberson finished fifth in the tour’s points standings. The team’s biggest moment came in September when Hurst captured the $5,000 Ryan Barker Memorial at Peoria (Ill.) Speedway and Alberson earned $10,000 victory in the following night’s Harvest 50 at Sycamore Speedway in Maple Park, Ill.
Late in the 2021 season — a year that saw Alberson score a career-high $12,000 triumph in March’s Thaw Brawl at La Salle (Ill.) Speedway and win MLRA events at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa, and Sycamore en route to a runner-up finish in the points standings — Roberts and Hurst mutually agreed to end their successful five-year run that included the 2018 IMCA Late Model national title, multiple track championships and feature wins at nearly 20 different tracks. Roberts, a 60-year-old who makes his living operating Roberts Custom Software, announced that going forward he would focus all his resources on Alberson and look to raise his team’s profile.
“We’re gonna try to take it up a level a little bit and see what we can do,” Roberts said in the wake of his team’s restructuring. “There’s still some things I’d like to do … travel a little bit more. (Hurst) didn’t mind some traveling, but I think he’d like to race a little less and I’m just in the mood of doing just the opposite. I want to race a little bit more.
“Garrett and I are about trying new experiences, trying to gain him more exposure and more track experience,” he added. “For me, it’s just kind of some bucket list items.”
With his racing operation, Roberts carries on a family racing tradition started by his late father Hershel, a Midwest legend who won more than 300 races over a 40-year driving career before succumbing to cancer in 2011 at the age of 68. He mused last fall about the possibility of hitting more major open-motor events with Alberson and perhaps even running the grueling DIRTcar Summer Nationals, but he’s gone even further with his decision to attempt the Lucas Oil Series this season.
According to Alberson, a Lucas Oil assault was discussed during the short off-season but really picked up steam after he jumped out of the 2022 starting gate with a superb performance during January’s Wild West Shootout at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park just outside his hometown.
“We had a pretty good year (in 2021),” Alberson said. “It was my best year by far, and we just toyed around with the idea of (the Lucas Oil Series). We were gonna get a different truck, a newer truck, and we were gonna have some of the pieces in place. We had good motors (Clements) and cars (Black Diamond), so, like, needing full-time help was kind of the next thing on the list of areas to go if we were gonna do it.”
With Justin Tharp in place as a full-time crew member, Alberson was a contender throughout the Wild West Shootout, posting three podium finishes topped by his first-ever WWS victory in Jan. 12’s midweek feature. The race paid a modest $5,000, but the satisfaction of finally breaking through in an event that launched his Dirt Late Model career — and with the miniseries racing at his hometown track for the first time — was real.
“It’s one of those things that still hasn’t sunk in totally yet, what it all means,” Alberson said more than a month after his checkered flag. “That Wild West Shootout is where it started —literally the first time I touched a track in a Late Model was during the Wild West Shootout, so to come full circle like that is really cool.
“And Dave Deetz was there, down there in victory lane with us. Stuckey was there. That was as cool as it gets, just having so many of the people there who got you there, the people who invested time and money in you to get you there.”
Alberson didn’t realize the same level of success during his first career foray to Speedweeks. He tallied a top finish of seventh on Feb. 10 at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., and also placed ninth on Feb. 1 at Bubba Raceway Park in Ocala, Fla., but he was no better than 13th in his other 11 feature starts. He left Florida sitting 15th in the Lucas Oil standings and second in the rookie battle, behind Ashton Winger of Hampton, Ga., but ahead of other candidates Daulton Wilson of Fayetteville, N.C., Ross Robinson of Georgetown, Del., and Spencer Hughes of Meridian, Miss.
Adjusting to new rules (specifically the rear suspension “droop” mandate) and unfamiliar tracks made the trip difficult for Alberson, but he didn’t expect anything less. After a post-Speedweeks tuneup March 5 at Smoky Mountain Speedway in Maryville, Tenn. (he finished 16th in the Ultimate Southeast-sanctioned Tennessee Tip-Off Classic), he’s ready to return to Lucas Oil action this weekend — Saturday at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway and Sunday at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio — to continue his national-tour education.
“I’m not where I want to be, or where I should be, on the driving end of it yet,” said Alberson, who after this weekend’s action will settle into the team’s new shop at sponsor Doug Curless’s compound in Coal Valley, Ill. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. But I think now we’re in a good place to learn.
“We’ve got a lot of the pieces in place to do well, as far as the physical pieces to run against these guys. We got good people and good things around us. It’s coming down to learning what it takes to do it night-in and night-out at this level, just learning how to make decisions on the fly and stepping out of your comfort zone. I’m real excited to have the chance.”
Ten things worth mentioning
1. Ken Roberts certainly grew close to Jeremiah Hurst during their successful stint together, prompting him to look back fondly at their partnership. “It’s truly been an amazing five years with him,” Roberts commented. “Five years is a long time for any team, and the things we accomplished, I couldn’t be more proud. I’m grateful to have been part of it. Him and his crew really are amazing people and I’m glad to have worked side-by-side with him these last five years. I wish them nothing but the best. Jeremiah’s a tremendous talent and I’m sure he’s got a lot more wins in him.”
2. Hurst offered his appreciation to Roberts in a Facebook post following their decision last fall to go in different directions. “I can’t thank Ken and (wife) Beth enough for all they have done for us over the years. They made all our dreams come true,” Hurst stated. “But all good things must end at some point and it’s just become time for that to happen. I’d like to send a sincere thank you to all the wonderful sponsors who have been a part of this ride and all our great fans and families.”
3. While Hurst made a handful of season starts late last season after departing Roberts Motorsports — he drove Joel Callahan’s Late Model and a Jeff Hundley-owned modified — the 46-year-old says he has no plans to compete in 2022. He added that he might make some periodic racetrack visits to help his younger brother Ian’s B-modified efforts.
4. When Kent Robinson of Bloomington, Ind., kicks off his 2022 campaign by entering Saturday’s Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned Icebreaker at Brownstown Speedway, the 34-year-old driver will make his first start since becoming a father for the second time. His wife, Sarah, delivered a healthy baby girl, Hadley Jo, on Feb. 14, but the birth wasn’t without incident — for K-Rob. Robinson noted on Twitter when announcing his daughter’s arrival that he “took a glance in the wrong direction and ended up horizontal on the OR floor. Neat learning experience.” Elaborating further in a follow-up Tweet, Robinson wrote, “Nurse said come on back, I didn’t know they had already started the procedure. Eyes immediately go to my wife on the table. They were using a sharp utensil. Tried to unsee it. Couldn’t seem to get past it. Got light headed and decided to lay down. The end.”
5. Max Blair of Centerville, Pa., my Inside Dirt Late Model Racing column topic last week, was planning to begin a two-week Southeast swing this weekend with a trip to Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala., for the Comp Cams Super Dirt Series-sanctioned Bama Bash. But with the two-day event canceled earlier this week by rain, Blair and Shawn Martin’s Viper Motorsports aren’t sitting still. They’re changing direction and targeting the Lucas Oil Series doubleheader at Brownstown and Atomic to get the team back in action before the March 25-26 World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series twinbill at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C.
6. Chris Madden of Gray Court, S.C., has listed the March 25-26 and April 1-2 XR Super Series-sanctioned Bristol Dirt Nationals at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway on his schedule, which effectively means he’s decided to relinquish the WoO points lead he obtained at last month’s DIRTcar Nationals and forego a bid for his first national touring series championship. Barring a change of heart or schedule alterations due to weather, Madden, 46, will skip the back-to-back WoO weekends at Cherokee (his home track) and Farmer City (Ill.) Raceway to chase four $50,000-to-win checks and a $100,000 points title at Bristol and then maintain a pick-and-choose itinerary for the remainder of the season.
7. Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway’s $3,000-to-win Super Late Model season opener on March 6 drew a modest 18-car field, a far cry from the 38 cars that signed in for last year’s lidlifter. Was it a sign that Port Royal, which offers arguably the best weekly Late Model purse in the country, will see its turnouts dwindle this season? In that vein, this weekend’s Saturday-Sunday Zimmer’s United Late Model Series doubleheader at the half-mile oval bears watching. Last year Port Royal’s pair of March ULMS shows were very well attended, pulling 47 and 45 cars.
8. This weekend’s three $3,500-to-win ULMS programs in central Pennsylvania — the tour’s season kicks off Friday at Williams Grove Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Pa. — will feature the first Late Model starts of 2022 for several Mid-Atlantic standouts, including Rick Eckert of York, Pa., Gregg Satterlee of Indiana, Pa., and Jason Covert of York Haven, Pa.
9. Speaking of central Pennsylvania, the area’s 410 sprint car fans are very familiar with the distinctive Brickmobile No. 461 machine that sprint car star Lance Dewease of Mont Alto, Pa., drove for legendary car owner Walt Dyer in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Spectators will have a chance to see the number and brick graphics scheme transferred to a Dirt Late Model when Dewease makes his full-fender debut in June 5’s Frank Sagi Tribute Race at Hagerstown (Md.) Speedway. Concept art of the Horst & McSherry Racing car that Dewease will pilot at the half-mile oval is out and it brings out some cool nostalgia for veteran fans.
10. A Dirt Late Model driver — well, actually a NASCAR Cup Series star who moonlights in Late Model competition — has for the first time been immortalized with a Funko Pop, a popular collectible figurine that depicts characters within pop culture. I saw a tweet noting that Cup champion Kyle Larson now has his own Funko Pop as part of a NASCAR series. Several social media users, however, wondered why the 29-year-old Larson’s Pop sports a gray beard. One Twitter response for the stubble color made me laugh: “When they built him they just looked at his win total and figured he had to be 100.”
