Smoky Mountain Speedway
While Owens races less, champion building more
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Jimmy Owens at the Dream. (joshjamesartwork.com)
Ten races. That’s the extent of Jimmy Owens’s racing schedule in 2026 as summer begins. For someone of Owens's stature — a four-time Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series champion who, at age 54, is coming off another championship on last year's Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series — that race count is almost impossible to comprehend.
A year ago, Owens had already raced 36 times by the time Eldora Speedway's Dream Week rolled around. This season, he arrived at the crown jewel having made just seven starts, a stark contrast for one of dirt racing’s most accomplished drivers, no matter the discipline.
So when Owens was asked whether racing so sparingly had felt strange, he didn't hold back.
"Yes, it does. That does suck, you know what I mean?" Owens said during Eldora Speedway’s Dream Week that spanned June 3-6. "You can't come here like that and race. I mean, I don't think we've raced four times, and we want to compete with these guys, but it's really, really tough to come here with hardly any laps and keep up."
Owens' season could finally begin gaining some traction in the coming weeks, starting with Friday and Saturday's Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series weekend at Smoky Mountain Speedway in Maryville, Tenn., 60 miles southwest of his hometown of Newport.
The Tennessee native will again pilot the McCarter family's MasterSbilt Race Car after the two sides pieced together a deal just a week before Eldora’s Dream XXXII. The reunion produced three DNQs: a 10th-place finish in a FloRacing Night in America B-main on June 3, a sixth-place finish in a Dream prelim B-main on June 5, and a last-place finish in his Dream Saturday heat after an oil pump belt failure.
Opportunities for Owens this year have come at a piecemeal pace, forcing him to bounce between rides — he's also raced Vic Hill's CVR Race Car — while carefully picking where his lone Koehler Motorsports-owned Rocket Chassis races.
The extra time, however, hasn’t been for naught. The lighter on-track schedule has allowed Owens more time to build the second edition of his self-built Late Model, which debuted in November 2024 before being shelved following a Feb. 13, 2025, crash at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla.
“It's hard to say how many races I’ll get in this year,” Owens said. “I started off, wanted to kind of slow down and not race a whole lot, and when I got closer to the time, I was ready to rock and roll. I thought, ‘Man, I'd like to jump on a tour again.’ But it didn’t work out. We couldn't make that happen.”
Despite entering the season expecting to race less, Owens admits the lighter schedule has been more difficult to embrace than he anticipated.
“It's hard. I enjoy being here,” said Owens, who expressed hopes at returning on the Lucas Oil tour this year that never materialized.
Much depends on what his budget allows and what his lean crew, led by brother Kurt Owens, can manage. But the schedule could pick up as summer unfolds. The Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series visits his home state this weekend, Ray Cook's Schaeffer's Southern Nationals begins July 12 at Wythe Raceway in Rural Retreat, Va., and Owens hopes to have his self-built race car back on track sooner rather than later.
“At some time, yes. I do not know. It’s according to how much we can get done, when we get it done, when we’re able to go, and stuff like that,”
Owens said of when his self-built Late Model will return to the track. “We ran pretty good at Volusia with it. Ran it a few places. It had some kinks in it we’d like to get a whole lot better. For the most part, I was decent with it right out of the box.”
Racing with the McCarter family has afforded Owens enough time to finish his self-built Late Model rather than rushing it along. He’s been able to refine the second version of a chassis that's become one of his biggest personal ambitions.
“It’ll look the same, but they’ll be a few differences here and there,” Owens said. “It will be the same as much as I can make it. As I say, we couldn’t jig (rebuild the first chassis). We had to redo it and all.”
Building a Dirt Late Model had lingered on Owens's bucket list for more than a decade.
Already known for producing Loose Gruff modifieds out of his Newport, Tenn., shop, Owens had spent years fabricating race cars and designing everything from rock crawlers and rock bouncers to monster trucks and dune buggies. He still builds about two modified chassis a year mainly for longtime customer and friend Jake O’Neil of Tucson, Ariz., who races out of Owens’s Newport shop whenever he races on the East Coast.
Owens even purchased chassis tubing more than a decade ago, anticipating the day he'd finally build a Late Model of his own.
“I've always wanted to do it, but kinda don't have a whole lot of confidence in what I do as far as myself," Owens told DirtonDirt in an interview last February about his self-built Late Model chassis. “I mean, it's really, really hard. You ain't going to out-engineer Longhorn or Rocket and those guys. Those guys are hard workers. I do not for one second think I can outdo anything they do. But it's just a bucket-list thing. I've always wanted to do it."
Having driven virtually every major chassis — MasterSbilt, Bloomquist, Rayburn, Rocket and Longhorn among them — Owens incorporated ideas from each while ultimately relying on decades of fabrication experience to shape a design he could truly call his own.
Owens largely built the first car in secret at his Newport, Tenn., shop, where the fabrication side operates separately from his race team. By the time most of his crew realized what he was building, he said the project was already about two-thirds complete.
When word of the car finally began circulating after its November 2024 debut, speculation quickly followed that noted fabricator Bruce Nunnally had built the chassis.
Owens says those rumors were blown out of proportion, though he acknowledged Nunnally helped manufacture a handful of components.
“It’s not a Brucebilt car. Those were all rumors,” Owens said. “He built some lower control arms for me.”
Beyond that, the car was unmistakably Owens's own. Even the chassis tubing had been carefully selected by Owens many years ago.
“It’s old, old stuff, which is a good thing because I don’t think you can buy tubing like it used to be,” Owens said. “Since (the) Covid-19 (pandemic), I feel like everything has took a crap. ... It’s just stuff I had put up. I went through all the motions several years ago and had all the stuff to do it.”
Drawing from 35 years of racing experience altogether, having nearly driven every prominent chassis in Dirt Late Model racing, Owens blended ideas he'd admired from builders such as C.J. Rayburn, Scott Bloomquist and Mark Richards with concepts that had proven successful on his Loose Gruff modifieds.
“Well, I built modifieds for quite a while, and they’re pretty good race cars," Owens said when asked if his self-built Late Model resembles any other he’s raced before “If you look at the mods and look at that, you'll see a resemblance there. If you look at Rayburn, you'll see a resemblance there. You can resemble it with anything you want to — and really, there's not a big difference between all of them. It's just based off experience, things we've done in the past like that.”
Owens quietly debuted the chassis in the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series finale Nov. 2, 2024, at I-75 Raceway in Sweetwater, Tenn. Few outside his inner circle realized he had built the car himself until the following week at the World Finals in Charlotte, where word spread throughout the pit area as Owens raced the decal-less chassis.
The early going suggested Owens’s compelling project had legitimate potential.
Owens finished fourth in the National 100 at East Alabama Motor Speedway, sixth in the 2025 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series opener at Golden Isles Speedway and appeared poised for a monumental victory Jan. 25 at Volusia Speedway Park, where he led 42 of 50 laps before ceding the lead to Garrett Alberson that night and fading to fifth.
Over roughly 20 starts, the car showed enough speed to convince Owens the concept was worth revisiting.
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Owens said of the chassis's personality. “But when there’s a little grip, we’re going pretty good. When it slicks and stuff like that, we struggle in that area a little bit.”
The project came to an abrupt halt last Feb. 13 at Volusia, when a hard crash with Dan Ebert and Trey Mills in a consolation race forced Owens to shelve his creation for the time being. Because Owens doesn’t have the technology required to reclip a chassis, he needed to rebuild it from scratch.
So, the second-edition chassis currently taking shape inside his Newport shop incorporates many of the lessons learned during those first 20 races, though he insists the overall philosophy remains unchanged.
“It’ll look the same, but there’ll be a few differences here and there,” Owens said. “It’ll be the same as much as I can make it.”
Owens is also quick to stress that building his own chassis isn't a criticism of the manufacturers that have supported him throughout his career. Rather, it was simply a personal goal he wanted to accomplish during the twilight of his driving career while also keeping the door open for another run on a national tour if the right opportunity arises.
“Everybody’s been good to us,” Owens said. “I just decided before I retire I was going to give it a whirl.”
