Golden Isles Speedway
Despite crushing defeat, teen shows his prowess
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Trey Mills rolls as Hudson O'Neal (71) makes contact. (Heath Lawson)
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (March 7) — With every circuit that Trey Mills remained at the front of the pack in Saturday’s 50-lap Wieland Winternationals finale at Golden Isles Speedway, the crowd watching from the stands and on the FloRacing broadcast steadily rallied to his side.
Here was a story of stories to cap Georgia-Florida Speedweeks: a fresh-faced teenager from St. Augustine, Fla., driving the race of his life, going toe-to-toe with veteran stars in pursuit of a $25,000 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series triumph that would have arguably been the biggest upset in the history of Georgia-Florida Speedweeks.
But it just wasn’t to be. Mills, who turns 18 on May 9, was a mere eight laps from the promised land of victory lane when he crashed out of the lead in heartbreaking fashion with a slap of the turn-one wall and an ensuing wild series of flips over the concrete barrier in the second turn.
It was the most abrupt, crushing loss possible for a young racer craving a national breakout, but there’s no doubt the circumstances endeared the slender, bespectacled driver to the entirety of the Dirt Late Model world. He understood the impact of his near-miss performance after he escaped the wreck without injury and soon found his pit stall swarmed by well-wishers, though he would have preferred to finish the job.
“It’s not the way that I want to be known, but it is what it is,” Mills said while standing near his mangled No. 14Jr. in the pit area. “I was giving it everything I had and it just didn’t work out.”
Mills was remarkably composed and pragmatic in the wake of his bitter fate. Moments after he climbed out of his car he was standing at the accident scene and calmly answering questions from pit reporter Ben Shelton in front of a FloRacing camera. He spoke more in the same manner in the pit area following the race, which was won by 22nd-starter Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio.
The kid had left nothing on the track. In the end he certainly went over the brink and it cost him, but he had pushed himself to the limit every lap in a vivid demonstration of his ability and potential.
A World of Outlaws Late Model Series Rookie of the Year contender this season with his family-owned team, Mills has been driving a Dirt Late Model since he was a tiny 11-year-old. He scored his biggest victories last season with two notably significant wins — June’s DIRTcar Summer Nationals Herald & Review 100 at Macon (Ill.) Speedway and September’s Cotton Pickin’ finale at Magnolia Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss. (for a career-high $20,000 payday) — but entered Saturday’s action with just a 14th-place finish in Thursday’s feature as his best run in 13 full-field A-main starts across three tracks during this year’s Speedweeks.
What’s more, Saturday marked just the fifth Lucas Oil Series feature start of his career. The previous two nights accounted for two of them and his others came at All-Tech Raceway in Ellisville, Fla., in 2024 (finished 23rd) and ’25 (16th). His 14th-place finish Thursday was a personal best for Mills.
So it was a bit surprising when Mills flexed so much muscle early in Saturday’s feature. Coming from the seventh starting spot, he put his Longhorn Chassis on the thick cushion at the very top of the 4/10-mile oval and vaulted forward, sailing past such established stalwarts as Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., and Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., before grabbing the lead from Mark Whitener of Middleburg, Fla., on lap 15.
“I restarted up top behind Ricky (on lap one) and he filed down in the bottom in front of Overton and the top was open so I just went for it,” Mills said. “And once I passed them, Whitener was kind of running a little slider line and I seen that I was catching him running the top and we were getting close to lapped traffic, so I was just driving it hard and got to him and managed to pass him.”
Overton soon settled into second place behind Mills. The 34-year-old couldn’t keep pace with the hard-charging pacesetter who’s half his age following a pair of restarts on laps 24 and 26.
“I’m sitting here riding around (early in the race) and Trey just comes blasting by and now I’m following his little ass, you know what I mean?” Overton said, before adding that he didn’t think Mills would be able to make it 50 laps at the frenetic speed he was running on a track that not only had a treacherous cushion but was also hard on tires.
“Listen, he’s driving the hell out of that thing. You know what I mean?” Overton said. “And who knows? He keeps having restarts and he doesn’t get slid getting into one (to shake his rhythm) and he might win, but it’s just hard to run that pace.”
A restart on lap 38 changed the race’s complexion. Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., up to third from the 19th starting spot, shot ahead of Overton at the green flag and dive-bombed Mills entering turn one. Then the race was on.
“I didn’t get as good a restart as I had the couple before, and Hudson, I let him get a good run on me down the frontstretch,” Mills said. “He threw it in there and I turned under him (off turn two), and then we threw a couple back-and-forth.”
The ensuing four circuits was a mesmerizing sequence as Mills showed true grit by answering each of O’Neal’s sliders with a crossover move and slider of his own at the opposite end of the track. O’Neal nosed ahead to lead lap 40, but Mills turned under O’Neal to go back ahead on lap 41 — with the two making contact on the homestretch — and then threw up sparks as he scraped the outside wall turns three and four to reach the line at lap 42 a few lengths ahead of O’Neal.
“It was a really good race,” O’Neal said. “We raced really hard and clean. We bumped a little bit down the front straightaway one time, but it was just, you know, we were going for it. We’re going for $25,000 and it was eight or nine laps to go and we were we were letting it all hang out.”
Mills might have gained the upper hand in the battle of sliders as he entered turn one noticeably ahead of O’Neal on lap 42. Even O’Neal, 25, acknowledged that fact.
“I think I had a good enough car to win,” O’Neal said. “I don’t know that I would have had another shot at him (after lap 42), though, unless he made a mistake.”
Which was precisely what happened on lap 42. Mills slipped ever-so-slightly riding the cushion in turn one, sucking him into the wall. His car’s rear end swung out into traffic and was clipped by O’Neal, sending Mills tumbling along and over the outside barrier. Mills landed on his wheels on the grass above the wall while O’Neal raced away but limped into the pit with body damage that knocked him out of the race.
“Once I got clear of him (on lap 42) I was giving it everything I had to try and drive away,” Mills said. “I wanted to win the race. I feel like I wanted to win as bad, or more, than anybody else.
“So I was just giving it everything I had and just overdrove it getting into turn one and caught the fence. Then the nose folded under and I climbed up on it and then Hudson had nowhere to go.”
O’Neal said he was “just wrong place, wrong time,” when Mills “messed up one time.”
“By the time I come in on the top I seen him in the fence, and then I thought maybe he was gonna just hit it and bounce off of it and come back down,” O’Neal said. “But then whenever he hit it, he raised up and it kicked the rear end back out in the racetrack and I didn’t have anywhere to go. He kind of bounced over my right-front tire … I don’t think it really hurt any of the suspension at all and I think the body looks worse than it is, but it was over for us right there.”
As soon as the Mills No. 14jr came to rest in a heaping mess of steel, his team members, including his parents Stanton and Amanda, sprinted from the vantage points in the middle of the infield to the scene. They were all relieved to see Mills quickly emerge no worse for the wear.
“My mom, she was a little upset,” Mills said. “She was just kind of scared, you know, but when she got to me she seen I was good and everything was OK. My dad, he was pumped up — you know, I was leading the Lucas race.”
Standing in the infield moments after the crash, veteran Florida racer and crew chief Jason Fitzgerald, who has served as a mentor to Mills throughout his career, remarked that as Mills engaged in the back-and-forth for the lead with O’Neal he kept saying to himself, “Calm down, boy, calm down.” Mills realized afterward that’s exactly what he needed to do.
“I just need to be more patient,” said Mills, whose only previous rollover crash came several years ago in a much softer local-show accident at All-Tech. “But it’s hard, especially you know, when you’re racing the racing the (Lucas Oil) points leader. I was giving him everything I had. I just needed to be more patient, calm down a little bit.
“My (signal) stick guy, he was showing me I was pulling away once I kind of got out front by myself, so I just needed to be more patient. And once I got clear of Hudson, I should have backed it down a little bit but I didn’t. You know, that’ll come with experience and time.
“I just hated it for my guys,” he added. “I tore up a really good race car. I feel like we should we should have won the race if I made the right moves. All in all, though, everybody knew we were here.”
Mills could chalk it up as a difficult — and expensive — learning experience. It will require more work for him and his team over the next week to assemble a bare frame at their shop before the WoO schedule resumes March 13-14 at Tennessee’s Volunteer and Smoky Mountain speedways, but he asserted that he now has “a lot of confidence” and won’t let the disappointment drag him down.
And Mills also opened the eyes of the drivers he’s trying to become.
“Dude, listen, I wish he would have won,” said Overton, who slipped backward on the lap-38 restart and settled for a fifth-place finish. “It would have been badass for Trey. When Hudson started sliding him after I fell back, I was like, ‘Come on, Trey, get back up there.’ He was giving it everything he had.
“He’ll win one of those Outlaw races because a lot of their tracks are like that, elbows-up and get-it-on. And I mean, I’ve just watched him grow up. He’s a little gasser, you know what I mean?”
