Volusia Speedway Park
Take Five: Extra help for Rice's JRR team
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Josh Rice at Volusia. (joshjamesartwork.com)
In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):
No. 1: Keir Hoover — the popular pit-area personality known as Big Snack — is back on the Dirt Late Model scene this season as a full-time crew member with JRR Motorsports and driver Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky. Hoover, who has worked with Jimmy Owens, among others, during his years turning wrenches, helps form an experienced trio backing Rice’s rookie Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series campaign alongside veteran crew chief Randall Edwards and Daniel Clark, who has crewed for Devin Moran and Nick Hoffman in recent years. Rice, by the way, had his best night of the DIRTcar Nationals going Friday at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., as he qualified through a heat for the first all week and appeared primed to bid for a top-five finish in the 35-lap World of Outlaws Late Model Series feature until a flat tire forced him to pit on lap 21.
No. 2: Rice’s JRR Motorsports effort received some extra manpower midway through Volusia’s week when Rice’s older brother, James, and JRR teammate Jason Jameson arrived at Volusia. I spotted Jameson, a former crew chief for Hall of Fame racer Darrell Lanigan, hard at work before the start of Friday’s program with broom in hand, sweeping the tarp covering Rice’s pit stall in Volusia’s lower pit area. “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean,” Jameson said. “That’s what Darrell would say.”
No. 3: With Jason Riggs of College Grove, Tenn., deciding to sit out Friday’s action at Volusia, he spent much of the evening with his wife, Courtney, and their two boys working his Riggs Motorsports teammate Brandon Overton’s T-shirt trailer. Riggs said he would be back behind the wheel of his car for Saturday’s finale and then turn over his machine’s seat to Jadon Frame of Winchester, Tenn., for the Feb. 20-21 WoO doubleheader at Hendry County Motorsports Park in Clewiston, Fla.
No. 4: Devin Moran’s wife, Lakia, has been hard at work in her husband’s merchandise trailer throughout Volusia’s action as she reached the eighth-month mark in her pregnancy. She’s due to deliver the couple’s first child on March 12, just days after Moran’s Georgia-Florida Speedweeks stretch of racing with the Lucas Oil Series is scheduled to end on March 7 at Golden Isles Speedway near Brunswick, Ga.
No. 5: Temperatures at Volusia have been quite cold each night after the sun goes down, especially Thursday and Friday when the thermometer dipped into the 40s. But one thing I noticed is that it seems to be consistently several degrees cooler in the track’s lower Gator Pond pit area. Is that just me, or does that pond down there chill the air a little bit more?
