Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Beyond stats, Moore was an elite racer
When Larry Moore passed away April 23 at the age of 83, Mark Richards knew the Dirt Late Model world had lost a legendary figure. But the 65-year-old Rocket Chassis co-owner wondered whether the current younger generation competing in the sport understood the Hall of Famer’s impact.
“They don’t know who he is,” said Richards, who fields the iconic Rocket Chassis house for Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill. “If they’re under 40, they never raced with him.” | Slideshow
Oh, today’s racers might be aware of Moore’s bigger accomplishments. The fact that he was the first three-time winner of the World 100 (victories in 1979, ’81 and ’85) stands out. He captured the 1987 Dirt Track World Championship at Pennsboro (W.Va.) Speedway when it paid a then record $60,000-to-win. He won the National Dirt Racing Association’s 1980 championship and is second on the short-lived national tour’s all-time win list with 18 triumphs. He claimed Short Track Auto Racing Stars titles in 1985-86 and was the third winningest all-time driver on the circuit with 34 victories.
Do they realize, though, that Moore, who called Dayton, Ohio, home, was a towering figure for more than just his success on the track? Richards, a Dirt Late Model lifer who met Moore for the first time nearly five decades ago when he was a 19-year-old crew chief for Rodney Combs, is a person who can make everyone realize just how significant Moore was in the division’s history.
“He was one of those guys who got us to where we ended up today,” Richards said. “I feel like he deserves a lot of respect for what we’ve got today, because he was one of the pioneers in that.
“You know, what happens is, time goes by and you forget about things like that, who he was, and then he dies, and you think, ‘Man, that guy really was a big part of who we are, and where we’re at as far as racing goes.’ And people today don’t know it.”
Richards came to know Moore during a formative era of Dirt Late Model racing, that late ‘70s-early ’80s stretch when NDRA founder Robert Smawley had given the class its first true national tour and purses began to rise substantially. Moore was part of a group that was building the division while barnstorming the country with box trucks and open trailers and relentlessly working to find a better mousetrap with their cars.
“The atmosphere was, like, the pioneering stages,” Richards said. “It was like everybody was taming the Wild West, you know? It was completely different than today. You basically was building most of your stuff yourself, and, in those days, we would see something someone beat us with and we wanted to go home and try to build something better.
“People today have no idea how those guys were, as far as understanding their cars, understanding what to do to them, and not going and buying the latest, greatest shock package or setup. There was a whole group of them. It wasn’t just Larry. I mean, Jeff Purvis was one of them. Freddy Smith was one of them. Jack Boggs. Those guys made their cars go themselves. And I’m not saying nothing bad about where we’re at today, but them guys never depended on anybody.”
Moore was at the top of those do-it-your-way drivers. Richards witnessed his mechanical wizardry and racing knowledge first-hand starting with the test sessions he and Combs began attending with Moore in 1979; that year Combs and Richards essentially took over legendary chassis builder Ed Howe’s house car program and it brought them close to Moore, who had been an integral member of Howe’s driver stable and even had been encouraged by Howe to focus on Dirt Late Model racing after finding success on asphalt.
Just being around Moore for several years — at tests, at the track, going up-and-down the road together to NDRA shows and other events — rubbed off on Richards. He called Moore’s understanding of cars “incredible.”
“I learned a lot of stuff from Larry just because the way he was,” Richards said. “I look back, and I feel like I learned a lot of stuff that I really didn’t know I was learning from that guy. It’s just stuff that just sunk in my head, and things he told me about cars that has remained with me all these years and still pertain to racing today.
“I never will forget, one time, Larry told me, he said, ‘Why do you keep tightening that car of Rodney’s up?’ And I said, ‘Well, he says he's loose.’ He said, ‘He’s not loose. He’s too tight.’ Then he said, ‘Look, when I pull on that track for hot laps, I know whether I’m gonna be loose or tight when the feature comes.’
“And he was right, because he understood that if that car was tight in hot laps, it was gonna be too tight as the car went on and the driver would have to force the car loose. And that’s the majority of people’s problems even today. Even I’m guilty of it, of getting my car too tight, then the driver has to bend the car and then the car’s loose.
“Larry was explaining that to me 40 some years ago,” he continued. “And I still think about it.”
Richards asserted that Moore “trained a lot of us” over the years, “and probably the guy that learned the most from Larry — and I told him this the other day when we were talking about this, and I told people at my shop — is Robby Allen.”
Allen, the 56-year-old veteran crew chief from Hagerstown, Md., who for the past decade has overseen Pennsylvania driver Gregg Satterlee’s efforts, was barely 18 years old in 1988 when Moore made the first of several short stints driving for Allen’s late father Bobby. Pushing 50 at the time and near the end of his years as a Dirt Late Model racer, Moore’s abilities rubbed off on Allen, who would become one of the most accomplished crew chiefs in the sport.
“Robby Allen is who he is today because of Larry Moore,” Richards said.
Allen would agree. There was no greater influence on his mechanical career than Moore, who also drove Allen’s father’s famed No. 55 late in 1991, all of ’92 and a brief period in ’93.
“I learned as much, if not more, from him than anybody I’ve ever been around,” Allen said. “He just understood stuff that a lot of guys just don’t get.
“I mean, he was a really good driver, but he was by far a much better racer than driver, and there’s a difference between being a good driver and a good racer. Those are different things. Generally, the best drivers don’t win the most races. It’s usually the best racers that win the most races.
“He just taught me how to race and how to be prepared and how to be good at what I did. He’s no different than anybody else — he could get off on some weird tangents, trying stuff, wanting to do stuff, but for the most part, he just understood what won races, and he understood as a driver what it took, he understood as a crew guy what you needed to do. He just understood the whole team thing, like how everybody needed to function.
“He was probably way ahead of his time with his understanding of a lot of the stuff he did, but he was good at making decisions,” he added. “He was a very analytical guy. I’ve said this a lot — there’s a lot of guys that know what they should have done Saturday night come Monday afternoon at lunch. It’s the guy that knows at 8 o'clock on Saturday night what to do that wins the races. And he was that guy. He just knew in the moment how to make good decisions, and he kind of taught me how to go about that and what it took to be able to do that.”
Moore’s meticulous nature was a key to his success.
“I’m gonna say the word with Larry was … he was ‘over ready’ for racing,” Richards said. “Like, he planned better than anybody.”
Allen came to realize that trait in Moore.
“That’s one thing he taught me about cars — everything on that car should be right,” Allen said. “Like, it doesn’t matter if you’re measuring stagger or how much fuel’s in it or the way the body’s on it. Just everything about that car had to be worked on.
“So many of the guys today, especially now the way the cars are kind of built for you, there’s a lot of people that have missed that ability to get everything on their car correct. He was really, really good at that.
“I mean, we used to carry different-sized steering wheels,” he continued. “He would change steering wheels for the kind of racetrack we were on. That was something only him as a driver would understand how that related. Like me, as a crew guy, I’ve never driven. I don't know what the difference between a 17-inch steering wheel and a 15-inch steering wheel feels like that, but he did. And we would change (steering) racks all the time, different ratios or racks to suit conditions. He was like that with everything.”
Moore’s combination of intimate knowledge of his equipment and driving ability put him among the elite.
“He wasn’t the guy that comes up with some kind of trick part that nobody knows about, and that’s why he won,” Allen said. “He’s a guy that just was so solid in every aspect of racing that that’s why he won. He wasn’t the most talented driver. He was a talented driver, but he wasn’t the most talented. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the pits, but there was nobody there that knew more about their car than he did.
“He taught me how to be prepared when you get to the track — and I don’t mean just prepared, like, the car prepared. I mean, like mentally prepared. Like, you had to go through in your mind what you thought was gonna play out beforehand, so when it did when stuff did happen, you were mentally ready for it.”
Allen recalled one particular instance, during a late-season STARS race in 1992 at Beckley (W.Va.) Motor Speedway, when Moore’s elite thinking was on full display. Moore possessed a clairvoyance with tire compounds and stagger that bordered on genius — Allen said “there was nobody that’s ever raced who was better at picking tires than him” — and he was always looking for an edge.
“We had leaf-spring cars back then, so we were like modifieds where the rear ends never moved, so like a quarter- or half-inch of stagger was a humongous change,” Allen said. “And he was a guy that swore he could feel an eighth-inch of stagger. If you told him them two tires were the same size and one was 88 and one was 88-and-an-eighth, he’d be like, ‘They're not the same.’
“So, like, you couldn't have enough tires with him. That time at Beckley, they had a dash for everybody who had either won a race or had set fast time or something and it was like $5,000-to-win. He says, ‘We need to get a new right rear,’ so I go up there (to the tire truck) and I get the one he wanted, and I come back and he says, ‘Hey, how many did they have of that tire?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know, they had two or three more.’ He said, ‘Go up and get them.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ So I went and got three more and I come back and I said, ‘What do you want me to do with these?’ He said, ‘Nothing. Tomorrow, take them back.’ And I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I don’t want nobody else to be able to get ‘em. I don’t know if everybody else needs him or not, but f--- it, we got ‘em.’
“That’s just kind of the kind of guy he was. He just thought of s--- like that. He was thinking about stuff that most people would have never thought about. He just was better at understanding how racing goes than a lot of guys that I’ve worked with. And I’ve worked with a lot of Hall of Fame race car drivers.”
Moore was at his focused best when it came time for him to run bigger tracks, “especially ones like Eldora (Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio) where every little aspect shows up, and so he liked those kind of places,” Allen said. “Maybe that’s where I kind of got my feel for liking bigger racetracks and stuff where everything mattered instead of little tiny racetracks where 50 percent of the stuff you worry about doesn’t seem to show up.”
Allen said Moore loved Eldora like no other track because “it’s one of them places where you don’t win off circumstances. If your car’s not right, and you don’t drive the place right, then you’re not gonna win. It doesn’t matter if there’s a foot-tall cushion and you’re a guy who can drive the cushion — if your car’s not right, somebody else is gonna beat you.
“He lived for places where it matters if you make a mistake. He liked that. He didn’t get all pumped up about going to some little quarter-mile race and whatever. If you said, ‘Hey, we're going to Eldora’ it was like a different guy. Like that week before you would go to Eldora, it was like, ‘By the way, you’re not sleeping this week,’ because you would work on s--- that it’s like, ‘Why does that need work normally?’ He’d say, ‘Well, why doesn't it?’ I was like, ‘OK, beings I’m 20 and you're 50, maybe I should listen to you.’ ”
Moore proved to be a superb mentor for Allen. They clicked despite their large age gap.
“He made me understand stuff that nobody else ever said to me or explained to me,” Allen said. “And I was young when I was around him. Even in ’92 or ’93, I was still only 21, 22 years old, so for a guy that was 30 years older than me, he was patient and would teach you stuff if you were willing and wanted to learn. He didn’t have no patience for somebody that didn’t want to learn, but if you were willing to work and you were willing to pay attention, he would teach you anything that he knew. And now that I am older, I realize how rare that is.
“He was really good at explaining stuff to where you could understand why we did it. He might just get out of the car and say, ‘Look, you need to put these tires on, we’re going to change that spring, and we're going to do this.’ And you do it, and then after the race, when you were driving down the road, he would explain to you why he did that stuff. He wouldn’t explain in the moment; you just needed to do what he was telling you to do. But then eventually, he would get around to explain to you why we did what we did. And like that kind of stuff is important, especially when you're young and you’re trying to learn stuff.
“That kind of relationship with an older person that knows a lot, that’s valuable to young people even if maybe they don’t really understand it at the time. I think a lot of people, when people like him get out of the car and they just kind of like say, ‘Do this, do this, and this,’ and then if you would say, ‘Why are we doing that?’ and he’d say, ‘Just do it,’ normal people would just be like put off by that. They’d be like, ‘Well, f--- this old guy. I’m tired of him yelling at me, telling me s--- all the time.’ But if you gave him just a little time, eventually he would make you understand. But you had to be willing to be there and do it.”
Allen said Moore was “easy to be around,” a guy who wouldn’t dwell on something that happened at the track and be miserable for days on end. He worked hard but played hard as well. As Allen noted, he wasn’t a conformist, and it’s why his chosen profession fit him perfectly.
“He was the guy that dirt racing, short track racing, was built for, to go up and down the road and go night after night in different places,” Allen said. “He was never going to be that guy with somebody telling him, ‘OK, you need to be here now. You need to be here then. This is what you need to do here. You need to do that.’ That couldn't happen with him. He’s just not that guy. He couldn’t be that regimented.
“And maybe that’s why me and him got along is because even though he was so much older than me, he acted like he was 20 years old his whole life. He was just that guy.”
Richards likened Moore to a dirt-track version of the late Dick Trickle, the legendary Midwestern pavement driver who, like Moore, was well known for his penchant for smokes, drinks and late-night fun. He was the definition of a hard-nosed, grizzled racer.
“Larry was that cowboy, short-track-type driver,” said Richards, who noted that after Moore’s driving days he became a valuable mentor to numerous drivers, including as an ARCA crew chief during the mid-2000s for current NASCAR O’Reilly Series regular Justin Allgaier. “He wasn’t gonna adapt. He wasn’t gonna change his ways. He was who he was.”
And in the final analysis of his career, few drivers have ever been better behind the wheel of a Dirt Late Model.
“Oh, I definitely put him in the top 10 racers in Dirt Late Model racing history,” Richards said. “He was one of the best.”
