Golden Isles Speedway
Home can wait as Terbo relishes Golden Isles
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Tyler Erb (1) battles at Golden Isles. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (March 6) — Tyler Erb was leaning on the counter in his Best Performance Motorsports team’s trailer and writing down notes from his runner-up finish in Friday's 50-lap Wieland Winternationals feature at Golden Isles Speedway when he was asked to describe the week’s racing action on the 3/8-mile oval.
The 29-year-old driver from New Waverly, Texas, looked up and smiled.
“Aggressive,” he simply said.
Erb was right on the mark with his assessment — it has been all-out, no-holds-barred competition throughout the first three rounds of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned meet, perhaps even the hardest and most consistently compelling racing of Georgia-Florida Speedweeks 2026. And it’s right up Erb’s alley.
“It’s the way I race every night,” Erb said with a sly smile.
Yes, Erb relishes running tracks that allow drivers to let it all hang out. Sliders. Pounding the cushion. Derring-do. All of it is possible at Golden Isles, and Erb is here for it.
Is Golden Isles producing top-notch entertainment because its Speedweeks events have been moved to early March — and graced with mid-70s temperatures and dry conditions every day — from the late-January time frame that typically came with cold weather and some rainy days? Erb would agree that’s playing a big factor, but the surface prep and shape of the track is part of it as well.
“There’s been years where it’s like one good race, but it’s been good all week,” Erb said. “That’s three days in a row the track has been racy. You can pass on it. If the hard charger’s plus-10, it's normally a good racetrack. If it’s less than 10, it’s a (bad) racetrack. And like here, I feel like a lot of cars are being passed. I mean, that means the racing’s good.
“The track has been better. It’s been racy and it’s a 190-foot wide,” he continued, exaggerating the width of the speedway for a bit of dramatic effect. “I’m not knocking any of the other tracks, but (at some) you’re not passing because there's no room to, like, do anything crazy. Well here, you have enough room. You can slide five cars (in a set of corners) if you really want to. Four of them should drive back by you if you don’t crash the person, but like, that’s what creates” action.
It also can stir up hurt feelings among drivers who come out on the bad end of sliders and pushing-the-envelope moves, but that’s where Erb believes everyone needs to take what occurs on the track with a grain of salt. It’s the nature of today’s Dirt Late Model beast. As Erb points out, a driver has to run hard and on the edge to be successful, especially at a track like Golden Isles.
Erb even maintains that, in the final analysis, “everybody races that way.”
“They can say they don’t, but I don’t care who it is,” Erb said. “Pick the cleanest driver out here. Who do you think that is? Like, they’re clean racers, but at the same time, they’re not cutting each other no slack. But at some point, you just have to hit the brakes.
“I mean, it’s just if you’re gonna do it (throw sliders), you cannot be a hypocrite. If you’re going to slide somebody and make them stomp the brakes … perfectly fine. When they do it to you, do not cry.
“Like, I don’t care. I could care less. Like last night, J.D. (Jonathan Davenport) turned left (in turn four while leading early in the 40-lap feature). I hit the brakes to not kill him (and he spun out of second place). It’s very easy to just stay in the gas and dump this guy, but that was not my intention. And I was like, ‘Well, he really has the spot. What am I going to do?’ You know what I mean?
“Like, you can point the blame, but at the end of the day, we’re all racing hard,” he added. “So, like, it’s not that big a deal. It’s just, if you are gonna ever throw a bomb on somebody, you can’t be mad for the next 100 that get thrown on you.”
Erb sets aside the scenario in which “someone just crashes you.” But he sees sliders as part of the racing.
“Like if you park on someone’s carburetor, that’s just what it is nowadays,” Erb said. “If we were in a sprint car, they’d all crash and die and have broke backs, but our cars, you can hit and crash s---, like, really good, so it’s just everybody's picking up on how us younger generation has raced for the last 10 years.
“Like, five years ago, only like five people ran the cushion hard. It’s not saying like the older guys couldn’t, but like they just didn’t do it. Well, now, that guy (42-year-old Davenport) just railed the cushion for 30 laps to win the race tonight. It’s just the way it is.
“So if you're a Type-A personality in a race car, you’re gonna go to bed crying a lot,” he continued. “Where if you’re just Type-B and you take it on the chin, you're like, ‘Well, today I was the bat, they were the ball,’ nine times out of 10, you’re gonna go to sleep happier than the guy that got hit with the baseball bat. That’s like the best way to describe it. And if you don't think that way, I just don’t think you’re gonna be good.”
Erb offered a philosophy he’s trying to follow: “Like last night (after spinning while challenging Davenport) I was upset, but I’m upset at myself more than anything. And I think a lot of people should just look in the mirror and be like, ‘You know what? Who am I really mad at?’ And then go from there. Like, did I turn left on this guy and cause him to run me over? Yes. Or is it f--- that guy or f--- me? You know what I mean?”
Erb made some slick moves working his way forward from the 14th starting spot Friday to finish second behind Davenport. But he noted with a smile that he “didn’t get close enough to make it exciting,” though at one point he thought he might have a shot at preventing J.D. from earning the $12,000 top prize and a third victory in as many nights.
“The last caution was not in my favor,” Erb said of a lap-41 slowdown. “When I cleared Hudson (O’Neal for second on lap 37), they (Davenport and O’Neal) were still like driving too hard, I feel like, above where it was clean. The top of one and two I felt like it was rubber, but like, Hudson and J.D. were entering above the rubber, the little bit that’s there, getting into one, and I was like, ‘That can't be good.’
“So then I beat Hudson on the restart and slid myself so to not (allow a) slide-or-die, you know what I mean? And then I was like, ‘OK, J.D.’s driving really hard, maybe he’ll crash.’ He was getting a little crazy there, but then we had a caution. After that if I got close to him in the middle of three and four, I definitely wasn’t going to slide him in one and two because that would have been a bad move. So I kept running one and two behind him, and then I would turn down in three and four. In the middle of the corner we’d probably like pull up beside each other, but then he drives back by me because of the momentum.”
Ultimately, with two laps remaining, Erb said he felt like he had a right-front flat tire and he lost ground to Davenport. He had to settle for the runner-up spot, but it was an uplifting rebound from the previous night’s 13th-place finish. In fact, he was beaming about being in such a good mood in the final days of Speedweeks.
“I’m loving it,” he said of his stay at Golden Isles. “The weather’s nice. I love my parking spot (next to a Crown Vic division racer at the back portion of the pits) … I like it because we don’t have to be on top of each other (in the spacious Golden Isles pits), because at the end of Speedweeks nobody should park within like 20 feet of each other because everybody gets so butt hurt.”
Speedweeks officially ends with Saturday’s $25,000-to-win finale at Golden Isles, but Erb isn’t ready to go home to his residence in Wapakoneta, Ohio, near the Best Performance Motorsports shop in St. Marys, Ohio. He’s been on the road since leaving the Buckeye State on Dec. 20 and has three more weekends of World of Outlaws Late Model Series racing in the Southeast on his agenda before finally heading back to the team’s home base.
“We drove the hauler from Ohio to my mom’s house (in Texas) on December 20 and stayed there for two weeks,” Erb said. “Went on vacation, everybody went home for Christmas. Then we went to Arizona (for January’s Rio Grande Waste Services Wild West Shootout), then we stopped back (in Texas) for a few days before going to Volusia (Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., for Jan. 22-24’s WoO-sanctioned Sunshine Nationals), and we’ve been at (friend and fellow racer) Steven Roberts’s place (in Georgia) or racing down here ever since.”
Erb noted that going home to Ohio really isn’t attractive to him right now because, well, his place was flooded three weeks.
Indeed, Erb’s home — the bottom level of a duplex he owns — was left a wreck after a pipe burst in its unoccupied upper level and swamped his living area with water. One of his former crew members who stopped by to pick up his mail informed him of the disaster while Erb was racing in last month’s Federated Auto Parts DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia. Erb then called veteran Ohio racer Jerry Bowersock, who lives in Wapakoneta, to further check out the situation.
“It flooded and ruined just about everything but my bedroom and my clothes,” Erb said. “The living room, kitchen, the cabinets, all the appliances, the furnace (in the basement), it’s all messed up. The TV in the living room is good, but the roof in the living room is bad.”
Erb said the damage is estimated at more than $60,000. He’s been in contact with his insurance company — he said he just received his first check — as Bowersock has helped him arrange the crews that have gone in to rip out the water-ravaged ceilings, walls, floors and other items ruined by the water and begin reconstruction.
So Erb’s time on the road just rolls on.
“I really don’t have a reason to go home because I still have to live in the rig, so it’s not killing me,” he said. “And it’s probably better because if I was at home then I wouldn’t worry about racing, I’d be worrying about fixing my house.”
