Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Sheppard riding resurgence with Rocket1
The scene around the Rocket Chassis house car trailer was upbeat — joyous, actually — after last Saturday night’s 100-lap Prairie Dirt Classic finale at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway. Smiles all around. Plenty of chatter. A swarm of fans.
At the center of it all was Brandon Sheppard, Rocket1 owner Mark Richards and team members Danny White, Austin Hargrove and Joel Rogers, soaking up the atmosphere following Sheppard’s fourth career victory in the blockbuster World of Outlaws Late Model Series event like it was … the late 2010s and early ‘20s?
Yes, New Berlin, Ill.’s Sheppard winning in his home state always packs quite a wallop with his faithful supporters, but there was something else in play here. It was very much a turn-back-the-clock moment, a return to the cool vibrations of Sheppard’s wildly successful 2017-22 stretch driving Richards’s iconic blue No. 1 after B-Shepp spent two seasons campaigning Longhorn Chassis and didn’t look like his vintage self in ’25 when he rejoined Rocket’s flagship operation.
Amid the post-race excitement, both Richards and Sheppard were asked if, with their first crown jewel triumph together since 2022’s PDC representing their 14th overall win of a 2026 season that currently sees them leading the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series points standings, they’re now officially back to the performance level of their previous stint as a team. They didn’t hesitate to respond in the affirmative.
“It’s starting to feel that way,” Richards, 64, said with a knowing smile (and maybe a little wink). “Everything’s starting to click like old times. The guys are clicking and Brandon’s clicking. Everybody’s getting along. There isn’t no issues in the team.”
Sheppard, 33, offered much of the same analysis, remarking, “I feel like this whole year’s been like the good old days honestly.”
Indeed, after recording a mere five victories — including two split-field semifeatures — last year and failing to make the four-driver Lucas Oil Series playoffs in his celebrated return to the Rocket fold, Sheppard has rebounded in a dramatic manner. The B-Shepp-Rocket1 combo is once again the all around contender they were during that memorable six-year run that included more than 100 wins, eight crown jewel triumphs, four WoO titles in five years and more than $3.5 million in overall earnings.
“Everybody’s confidence is really high, including Mark’s, you know, reading what I’m saying, taking the information that I’m giving him and applying it to the car,” Sheppard said. “And when that mesh is good, and the team and everybody’s meshing good, it’s … we run good everywhere we go. Every time I go out on the track, I feel like I’ve had a car to win and capable of running up front.”
Was this year’s results what Sheppard envisioned when he made the decision to reconnect with his Rocket family after racing for two years in the Longhorn camp, including one out of his family’s shop in Illinois and the other as Longhorn’s Factory Team based in China Grove, N.C.?
“Absolutely,” Sheppard said. “This is what I wanted when I came back with this team. This is the best team in racing in my opinion, and me and Mark just get along so well and we work well together. And when his confidence is high in me and mine’s high on him, the team’s clicking like we are right now.”
The PDC was Sheppard’s first crown jewel checkered flag of 2026, but he was in the mix up front in all four of the majors contested over the last two months. He finished second to Bobby Pierce in the Show-Me 100. He was running second in the Dream and primed to challenge Pierce for the lead late in the distance when a blown right-front tire sent him into the wall. He was a runner-up again in the Firecracker 100. He finished fifth in a Silver Dollar Nationals run on a bottom-dominant track after winning the 50-lap preliminary feature leading into the weekend at Shelby County Speedway in Harlan, Iowa.
“We had a good enough car to win all them races,” Sheppard said. “Sometimes it just doesn’t fall your way, but I know it eventually would.”
The Rocket XR2 model that Sheppard is piloting has provided him the confidence to know he can compete for victories both big and small. It’s a design that Sheppard and Rocket1 debuted just over one year ago, in early July, and its development has brought him to the point where he’s now the No. 1-ranked Dirt Late Model driver in DirtonDirt’s Top 25 power rankings.
Richards understood that recapturing the glory days of the past with Sheppard wouldn’t happen overnight. It was going to take not only a better mousetrap out of the Rocket shop in Shinnston, W.Va., but a reconnoitering of Sheppard’s mindset after his dalliance with Longhorn.
“Well, I knew it was going to be a lot of work,” Richards said. “So we just kept working and kept working, and once we brought that car out in July last year I kind of knew we was going to be able to get on the right track. But Brandon had went to another manufacturer, and their thinking, it was different than our thinking, and he was kind of in between the two when he came back.”
With assistance from Precision Suspension’s Sammy Speaks and Pete Brower, Richards and his staff have created a car that Sheppard is showing doesn’t follow the old Rocket playbook for success.
“I kind of knew the direction we needed to start leaning towards, and now we’ve got a car that the slicker (the racing surface) gets, the better he gets. And that’s a big part of the game,” Richards said. “We’ve had to get (Sheppard) programmed to where, ‘Hey, it’s not going to be like the old Rocket days when we used to mow the cushion down and when it got slick, we sucked, you know?’
“When (the track’s) fast, you know, the way a lot of cars are today, you don’t have to be that technical or that smooth. You just wail and bail. That’s the way we did it for years, you know, with Josh (Richards) and Brandon both. When it would come to slick (track) races …”
Richards paused for a moment. Then he spoke again while shaking his head in near disbelief.
“I never thought I’d wish that the track gets slick,” Richards said.
But that’s where they’re at now, which explains much of Rocket1’s return to prominence with Sheppard.
“I felt like at the Dream, we had a car that was good enough to win and had a tire blow out,” Richards said. “But for us to be that long into a race and now we’re rolling … you know, usually by then we’re starting to fade.
“For some reason, our car just keeps getting better the slicker it gets everywhere we go, which is unusual for us. That’s not what we’ve built on, but it’s a good thing because in these long races, you know, it’s usually slicker.
“We’re in a different world right now,” he added. “(Sheppard) told (Friday) night (after winning a 25-lap PDC semifeature), ‘In the early part of that race, I felt terrible … until it got slick, then I felt perfect.’”
Sheppard said a “dirty” track “used to be a condition that we really shined in,” but they’ve gone beyond that with their current car.
“Well, now we’re good in that condition — we can qualify good, we can run up front in a heat race — but then the slicker it gets, the better we get,” Sheppard said. “So we kind of got the best of both worlds right now.”
The machine’s slick-track strength was evident during the PDC headliner as Sheppard was at his best late in the distance; he overtook race-long pacesetter Trey Mills of St. Augustine, Fla., an 18-year-old WoO rookie who started from the pole position alongside Sheppard, on lap 64 and never was headed. There was no drop-off in Sheppard’s speed down the stretch.
But it wasn’t all about the car’s staying power. Sheppard’s talent, his race craft, his patience, was on full display for the entire race.
“I told myself before I went out there, if I can beat (Mills) to (turn) one, then I’m going to try to lead everything,” said Sheppard, who was well aware that every lap was worth $500 to its leader (in 2022 he led the race from flag-to-flag to push his winner’s take to $100,000). “But if I can’t … if you don’t beat the guy to one, you’re not going to pass him until the track starts to slick up. That’s just how it is here. Til it slows down just a little bit, you’re not gonna pass him.
“So I knew as soon as I got to one and he was ahead of me, I was like, ‘Well, I just got to run my own race here and try to win. Bobby (Pierce) got me at one point there (for second) on a (lap-33) restart, but, you know, I just was kind of trying to bide my time as long as I could.”
Sheppard stepped up his assault after the halfway point, reclaiming second from Pierce on lap 61 and sliding by Mills three circuits later.
“I knew my car was good in the middle-bottom, and there come a stage in that race, right before I got the lead, where I really got good about a lane off the bottom,” Sheppard said. “I got to where I could leave the corner and be right at Bobby’s quarter-panel. So then I started just showing a nose, showing a nose, and then he started moving around and that let me slide him, and then I did the same thing with the 14 car (Mills).”
But a caution flag flew shortly after Sheppard assumed command, and that took Sheppard out of dealing with lapped traffic but put him in the predicament of figuring out what lane he should run with Pierce and a rising Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., chasing him.
“The worst part about the race was I passed all them guys like in the middle-bottom, and then the caution immediately come out when I went to the lead so I’m like, ‘Now what do I do?’” Sheppard said. “It’s like, ‘OK, I don’t have to see that traffic.’ But on the other hand, you know, when the caution’s out, you’re looking at your guys, they’re telling you, ‘Go, blah, blah, whatever.’ They’re telling you what they think you should do.
“When you just stay green, you’re just doing it by the seat of your pants. All the pressure’s on you. You don’t have to look at nobody, nobody’s telling you nothing. You just go.”
Richards decided it was best to leave the lane-choice decision to Sheppard.
“Dan (White) asked me, ‘Where do you want him to run?’” Richards related. “I said, ‘Wherever he wants to run. He’ll figure it out.’”
Hearing Richards comment amid a postrace interview, Sheppard interjected with his strategy.
“Yeah, I figured it out, all right. I said, ‘I’m just gonna do my thing until somebody shows up (to challenge),’” Sheppard said. “I knew the old faithful line gets ‘er done here, so I went with that. It’s just keeping your speed up across the corner. If you get against the cushion here, the cushion gets super thin in the middle of the corner so you can blow the deck out really easy. I just keep my speed up really good across the corner, and then use the cushion a little bit to help me exit.”
Sheppard said he “made dad nervous” during a couple lap-96 restarts — he was jokingly referring to Richards, not his father, Steve Sheppard Jr., who was watching from the turn-four bleachers — but beat O’Neal to the finish line by 0.697 seconds. Then the celebration began — in front of roaring backstretch fans during a victory lap in his car, in the winner’s circle, during the traditional PDC photo-op at the nearby Bank of Pontiac drive-thru and, finally, back at the Rocket1 trailer.
All the goodwill directed toward Sheppard from the fans swarming him in the pit area made it clear how popular he is, especially in his home state. It doesn’t even seem that Sheppard, one of the biggest winners in the sport over the past decade-plus, hears any boos, though he thinks there might be some.
“I mean, they do (boo), but not in Illinois,” Sheppard said with a smile. “Well, Bobby Pierce fans do I guess. That’s fine. You know, everybody’s got their guy.”
Sheppard was asked why he thinks he’s so well liked. What is it about him that makes him so popular? He had a thought on that front.
“I’m just not confrontational,” Sheppard said. “And I try to drive as clean as I can, because I know that I need to keep my car from getting tore up in order to win these big races.”
Sheppard believes some of his popularity derives from him developing an on-track style that sort of bridges the gap between today’s veterans in their 40s and 50s and the younger, harder-charging newcomers.
“I feel like I’m still young, but I did grow up racing with, like, the older generation guys,” Sheppard said. “Like when I first started running Outlaws, I was with (Darrell) Lanigan and (Shane) Clanton and (Rick) Eckert and Clint (Smith), all them guys. So I feel like I kind of cut my teeth with them guys as opposed to a young group now that’ll just drive in there and take a door off you.
“I think it’s something to do with that, but I really just strive to try to drive as clean I can because that’s how I want to be raced also. There’s certain guys, if they run you dirty, you gotta run them back dirty, but luckily, I feel like I got a lot of respect in the pit area. And most of the time, they don’t do anything too stupid to me.”
It’s that tough-but-clean persona that endears B-Shepp to Dirt Late Model racing’s fans. It’s what makes them want to unfurl a banner that reads “Sheppy til I die,” which was flying after his PDC victory and added a final cherry on top of his special night.
“I love it,” Sheppard smiled, giving his stamp of approval to the banner.
