Hagerstown Speedway
B-Shepp adapts to win at ‘home’ for Rocket1
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Brandon Sheppard wheels around the Hagerstown half-mile. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (April 26) — Mark Richards and Brandon Sheppard have won just about everywhere together, but until Sunday, Hagerstown Speedway had remained unconquered.
That made their latest Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series victory — an utterly dominant performance as Sheppard won by nearly six seconds — all the more striking given Richards’s history at the Maryland half-mile. Few tracks have been part of his storied racing life longer. | RaceWire
From his formative years as a teenaged mechanic to building Rocket Chassis and company’s house car program into flourishing operation that stands today, Hagerstown has always felt like home, especially given it’s just three hours from his Shinnston, W.Va., headquarters.
“It’s like a home track for us,” Richards said.
For Sheppard, however, the half-mile isn’t even close to his native New Berlin, Ill., being nearly 12 hours away. In fact, it’s one of the furthest tracks he’ll race from home all season.
That distance has limited Sheppard to just six previous starts at Hagerstown, with only two top-five finishes to his ledger. If there’s anything to know about the half-mile, it’s that drivers rarely solve its tricky complexion right away — from its long straightaways to its technical, rhythm-breaking corners — even for a multitime champion like Sheppard.
And even for someone of Sheppard’s stature, he still leans on the wisdom — and storytelling — of Richards in territory unfamiliar to him like Hagerstown.
“Mark has a thousand stories from here. Before the feature, Mark was just coaching me,” Sheppard said. “When the track has been similar over the years, what kind of lines people run, just giving me pointers to help any way he can.”
Upon returning to the Rocket1 Racing transporter, where Richards was already mid-interview reflecting on some of his finest moments at Hagerstown, Sheppard seemed to savor a history lesson of his own.
“They said on the frontstretch you won the first Conococheague 50,” Sheppard told Richards. “Whatever this race is, you won the first one.”
“With Rodney Combs. That would’ve been in the ‘80s,” Richards responded, his memory serving correct with that inaugural Conococheague event victory, then 100 laps, coming in 1982.
“That was many moons ago,” Sheppard said through a proud smile.
Richards’s rich history at Hagerstown Speedway, of course, can’t be mentioned without his son, Josh, and his success there, too, as a two-time World of Outlaws Late Model Series winner at the Maryland half-mile in 2007 and ’10.
The blueprint the younger Richards left behind on how to navigate Hagerstown endures with the elder Richards to this day. In fact, it played a role in Sheppard’s victory.
"I feel like Gary Stuhler was the king of this place for a long time,” Richards said. “And he had a driving style that worked, and then, when Josh came over here and started running the (Ernie Davis-owned) No. 25 car, he changed the way you race this place. And I've been telling Brandon for a number of years how you race this place.”
“Tonight, we was on top of the truck, and I said, ‘Listen, this is how you race this place. I don't care how anyone else drives it.’ It's the way Josh won all them races and just drove away from everybody, and Brandon did a perfect job.”
Stuhler, the all-time winningest Hagerstown driver at 139 triumphs, embodies an old-school, straight-and-smooth driving style. Josh Richards, meanwhile, carried more of a free-spirited approach around the Maryland half-mile, one that Sheppard emulated Sunday.
“Josh drove completely different than Gary Stuhler. Gary Stuhler drove up the straightaway, braked real straight, turned the wheel after he broke, and then rolled into the corner,” Richards said. “Where Josh ran this place and made it like a bigger circle. And that's what Brandon was doing tonight. He was running a pretty big circle.
“It’s hard to drive it like a circle because the way it's shaped. It's got such a long straightaway. Josh changed it. Josh changed it. And, you know, (I told him), ‘We need to try to exit, flow, drive out to the flight stand, and then drive off.’ ”
That style of driving is more foreign to Brandon Sheppard, who grew up racing on bullrings and is more accustomed to an elbows-up approach than the precision-focused discipline of holding a smooth, tidy wheel at a half-mile like Hagerstown.
“It’s 180 degrees difference for sure. But I’ve been driving for Mark a long time now. … We may not come out here a whole lot, but I’ve raced them enough to have some experience,” Sheppard said. “I kind of have a good idea of how to change my driving style to fit, you know, Port Royal and Georgetown and Hagerstown. When your car is good, you can unload at places and have confidence. That helps, too. Being able to drive the track right.
“It was definitely pretty tricky out there. … I was super good at diamonding it off the corner, so that’s what really got me around most of them lapped cars. It was to be able to float the middle high over there (in turns three and four) and diamond when (lapped cars) would float up down here in one and two.”
Brandon Sheppard pointed his Rocket1 Racing machine wherever he set his mind — and make it work. That’s been much of the revitalization story for Sheppard and the Rocket1 gang all season.
“No matter what, it seems to be up front,” Sheppard said. “I can’t thank them guys enough. It’s been working. The confidence is up. Everything’s going really well.”
Sheppard, a three-time Lucas Oil winner this season, could easily have at least two more victories after missteps in lapped traffic cost him wins Feb. 24 at Ocala (Fla.) Speedway and March 29 at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio. He also suffered flat tires in two of his four Ocala starts, including Feb. 28 while running third.
“We’ve had a really good car all year. Sometimes, you know, circumstances, have held us back from really where we should be. Two races in Florida, those two in Ocala has got us behind (in the Lucas Oil standings),” Richards said. “Those flat tires, those flat tires. And that's when they were counting your best five (Georgia-Florida Speedweeks points events toward the series standings). And, you know, we lost them two, and they were going to be at least top-fives.
“And we ended up 17 or 18th, so that killed us and started us off bad. But all year, I mean, (Sheppard’s) been consistently good, and that's all we can hope for is us to be consistently good. And we'll see what happens.”
The weekend’s pair of half-miles at Georgetown (Del.) Speedway and Hagerstown nudged Mark Richards and Brandon Sheppard toward a conversation that, until now, hadn’t surfaced much: June 4-6’s Dream at Eldora Speedway.
With Sheppard now owning three half-mile victories this season — with wins Feb. 14 at Volusia Speedway Park, Feb. 19 at All-Tech Raceway and Sunday at Hagerstown — it was only natural for the Rocket1 Racing team to at least broach the subject of how their current big-track form might translate to Eldora.
“Volusia is more like Eldora. And he was good at Volusia. I don’t know, we feel good,” Richards said. “We’ll see what happens. That's what we talked about, and we were good there last fall. But we're a little different than we were then. Actually, Brandon and I talked about it today. He said, ‘What do we do (at Eldora)?’ And I said, ‘We just got to go in there what we're running good with, and see where we're at.’ So, we were actually talking about that today.”
Still, any serious focus on Eldora remains on the backburner, at least for now.
The team faces a demanding 16-race schedule in May, with seven of those races in nine days, beginning this weekend at Circle City Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind., and Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., before rolling into the five-race Illinois Speedweek next Tuesday at LaSalle Speedway.
One the team leaves for Circle City, they won’t return home until after May 24’s Show-Me 100 at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., at the earliest.
“Of course, there's all these other races just up. We got so many races between now and then,” Richards said. “So, we got a month coming up this week. We leave Thursday for a month. It's a long time on the road. Who knows, by then, we might be another direction. But right now, we're pretty much on track for where we left Florida, and we’ve just been tuning on it, getting a little better each time.”
