Eldora Speedway
Hoffman's confidence surges with Flo tour win
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Nick Hoffman cruising at Eldora. (joshjamesartwork.com)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (June 3) — Nick Hoffman unloaded in Eldora Speedway’s pit area Wednesday to kick off Dream XXXII Week with more attention focused on him than he’s ever experienced at the famed half-mile oval. | Complete Dream coverage
And why not? He’s a bona fide World of Outlaws Late Model Series championship contender. He was the only driver to finish among the top-five in all three of Eldora’s crown jewel events last year. He’s hot off a career-high $100,057 victory in last Saturday’s WoO-sanctioned Blaster 57 Special at Mansfield (Ohio) Speedway.
The Big E hype is, indeed, real for the rising 34-year-old star from Mooresville, N.C. Even his car owner, Tye Twarog, recognized all the talk swirling around Hoffman’s chances for success this week.
“A lot of guys are putting him on the spot,” Twarog said. “I mean, I heard a lot of people say, ‘Hey, he’s the favorite,’ and all of that stuff.”
Twarog tried to downplay the discussion, joking that everyone pushing Hoffman as the man to beat in Eldora’s first major of 2026 “need to come hang around my race team — we’re just a bunch of hillbillies, you know what I mean?” But he also understands that the flowers thrown Hoffman’s way are a clear signal of his driver’s exploding stature in the sport, which grows with every new and lofty height he achieves.
Like Wednesday night. Hoffman lived up to his high-level billing, roaring out of the gate with a convincing victory in the 50-lap FloRacing Night in America feature.
It was a $20,000 triumph that has no actual bearing on the $100,000-to-win Dream that uses preliminary programs on Thursday and Friday to set heat lineups for Saturday’s finale — other than proving that Hoffman’s odds of breaking through on Eldora’s biggest stage appear to be pretty darn good.
Hoffman is ready for his moment. He’s never been more ready, in fact. He’s simply riding so high right now that, no matter how many people push him as the driver most likely to reach victory lane on Saturday, he won’t feel any extra pressure.
“I didn’t even look at the attention side of it as much as, like, I just have a massive amount of confidence, you know?” Hoffman said while standing near his No. 9 during Wednesday’s postrace technical inspection in front of Eldora’s infield media center. “I tell anybody, a driver’s confidence is probably more important than anything in racing, so just this is the most confident I’ve ever been in my life in a Late Model. I feel back like I was in my (dominating) modified days.
“So, it’s just crazy right now. When you can ride the high and you made 120-grand in the last few days … never in my life could I imagine this. It’s been a great week. You dream of these kind of things, you know?”
All the momentum that Hoffman picked up with his massive Mansfield win — his sixth of the WoO campaign to set a single-season career high on the national tour — rolled on at Eldora. Driving a 2024 Longhorn Chassis that he’s reserved exclusively for Eldora duty the last two years, he operated in a realm of his own, turning the second-fastest time in his qualifying group, winning his heat and advancing from the fourth starting spot in the feature to overtake race-long pacesetter Kyle Bronson on the 17th lap.
Hoffman’s only anxious moment came on lap 47 when he slipped high in turn two while working slower traffic. It allowed Devin Moran, who started eighth and reached second on lap 29, to charge underneath Hoffman down the backstretch and very nearly steal the race. Hoffman had to resort to a blocking maneuver entering turn three to stave off Moran and go on to win by 1.216 seconds.
“I felt like my car was good if I could circle (the half-mile oval), and then a couple of those lapped cars started kind of dirtying the racetrack up a little bit and it screwed me up and that’s what really happened,” Hoffman said, describing how he killed his machine’s speed rounding turn two with three circuits remaining. “You just feel like you free-spin all the way down the back straightway and make no speed. It’s like you got a parachute out. It’s wild. It's like a little mistake is a half a second, so it doesn’t take much.
“I think I got to work on my balance a little bit to run that bottom if I have to. I stayed mostly middle (of the track) until I had to move down to protect. If you don’t protect, (Moran’s) going to slide me. He’s smart enough to just carry it in there (to turn three) and just get across my nose and make sure I get dirty air, and then the race is pretty much his at that point.”
Hoffman refused to let Moran, 31, seize the initiative. He readily admitted that fact during a conversation with Moran after the race.
When Hoffman — with Moran standing alongside him in the pit area — was asked what happened on that decisive 47th lap, he was succinct.
“I hang a left because I see a white nose underneath me and I’m like, ‘I gotta go,’ ” Hoffman said.
Moran then asked Hoffman, “Were you watching the big (video) screen (outside turn two)?”
“Big screen, and looking left all the way down the back straightaway,” responded Hoffman, who had a brand-new Andy Durham Chevrolet engine powering his car. “I’m a big advocate of turning the big screens off, but I’m gonna watch it if I got it.”
Hoffman proceeded to look at Moran and remarked with a smile, “I don’t know if you seen my turn signal, but I was turning left.”
“Yeah,” Moran offered back with a laugh, “he had a big hand out the window getting into three.”
Hoffman said he “had no choice but to block” when Moran challenged. Moran didn’t seem upset by Hoffman’s tactics with the race on the line.
“He’s the best in the country right now,” Moran said, seemingly happy just to have snapped out of a recent slump that had seen him go eight races without a top-five finish.
Hoffman’s victory was the seventh overall of his career at Eldora, including four in open-wheel modified action and two previous triumphs in a Dirt Late Model. He won season-opening Sunoco American Late Model Series events in 2017 and ’18 driving the Jones Oil Company No. 2; the $2,000 score in ’17 was his first-ever anywhere in a Dirt Late Model.
Twarog, meanwhile, celebrated his first Eldora victory as a car owner. Coming just days after the mega-win at Mansfield, the 45-year-old from Coshocton, Ohio, was overjoyed.
“This is awesome. Very awesome,” Twarog said. “Obviously, I've been trying to win here for, what, 12 years? First with (Steve) Casebolt and then with Devin and Nick. Devin had a race won actually (in a 2022 Dream preliminary postponed to Saturday afternoon) and the caution came out with like five laps ago and (Brandon) Overton got him for the win (leaving Moran third).
“Mansfield last week and here … two Ohio wins. That means more to me than anything right now. Obviously the goal is to get one of them Dream trophies or the World 100, but honestly, you know, it’s pretty cool. I’ve got sponsors here and we were up in a suite (outside turns three and four) and me and (fiancee) Dusti (Rayburn) ran down here (to victory lane). I never ran that far in my life. I thought I was in high school football training, you know what I mean?
“It’s an awesome feeling,” he continued. “It's great.”
As a speed shop proprietor and operator of a consulting business with the state of Ohio in which he makes rotating visits to seven water treatment plants within a 75-minute radius of his home and tests the water for the proper chemicals, Twarog considers himself a blue-collar team owner. That underdog mentality coursing through his veins makes winning such high-profile events as Mansfield’s six-figure race and Eldora’s Dream week opener entirely overwhelming.
“Just going to the bank and putting that money in a race account, it helps our race team a lot,” Twarog said, referring specifically to the $100,057 that Hoffman earned at Mansfield. “Just like here — you come to Eldora and I tell everyone, this is one of the most expensive places to race. It costs me probably $10- to $12,000 to run Eldora (for a weekend), and obviously we got lucky tonight, but it’s just amazing to put that kind of money in the bank to help our race team.
“Nick’s doing a great job and he’s absolutely getting a lot of money as well. I mean, you look at the car right now. There’s not even a scratch on the car. You know, we’re running Eldora, and there’s not a scratch. So it tells you how stable his car is and how good he is right now.”
Hoffman would agree that all is going swimmingly for him and Twarog. He doesn’t want to even take a break from racing on Thursday for fear his rhythm might be disturbed.
“Being off tomorrow is gonna suck,” said Hoffman, whose Dream preliminary race night is Friday. “I want to keep it going, you know? I guess we’ll hang out and have some fun tonight, and then I got all day Thursday) to hang out and recover and watch what the racetrack does.”
Maybe Hoffman will even have an opportunity to kick back and really soak in the significance of his Mansfield victory.
“I’ve savored it a little, but it still hasn’t really probably hit me either,” Hoffman admitted. “I got a real job as far as Elite Chassis so I went back home and was building modifieds for two days (with his Eldora car already prepared) before I had to come out here. That win was monumental for me and huge, but it hasn’t totally set in.”
Of course, Hoffman might have another blockbuster triumph to try to grasp come Saturday night. At least that’s what so many people are expecting.
