Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: McCowan earns new feeling of belonging
Dillon McCowan’s superlative sweep of July 10-11’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series doubleheader at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., gave him a newfound celebrity in the Dirt Late Model world. He could sense the change the very next week when the national tour resumed in Iowa.
“It’s cool,” McCowan said during last month’s Al Belt Custom Homes Silver Dollar Nationals at Shelby County Speedway in Harlan, Iowa. “A lot more fans, I feel like, notice me now.”
But then the fresh-faced, 22-year-old redhead from Urbana, Mo., paused for a moment. He proceeded to note that as attention-grabbing as the $41,000 weekend at his home track certainly was for him, it might have made an even brighter star out of someone else on his team.
“I think dad’s a bigger hit than I am, you know?” McCowan said with a laugh. “Everybody notices him now when they come by.”
How could they not? McCowan’s father and car owner, Charlie, endeared himself to the thousands of people at the track and watching the livestream on FloRacing with his unrestrained postrace celebration after each of his son’s victories. Following Dillon’s $15,000 triumph in the Salute to Forrest Lucas, Charlie stood on the frontstretch, triumphantly raised his arms to the grandstands, and then kneeled down to kiss the racetrack’s dirt surface. The next night, he went even further after Dillon’s $26,000 score in the Diamond Nationals, happily lying on his back in the wet clay on the edge of the infield and flapping his arms and legs back-and-forth like a little kid cavorting in snow.
Charlie McCowan, 50, relished every second of his son’s incredible breakthrough on the national scene.
“It was great,” said Charlie, who co-owns Pomeroy Services, a nationwide telecommunications company, and operates a black Angus cattle farm. “(James) Essex (the Lucas Oil Series announcer) come down to the pits before the races that Saturday and he says, ‘Charlie, if you win tonight, are you going to kiss the dirt again?’ I said, ‘James Essex, if we win tonight, not only would I kiss the dirt, I’ll lay down in the middle of the front straightaway in front of everybody and do mud angels.’ ”
Charlie’s joy, relayed to many more people afterwards by video replays and photos posted to social media, somewhat overshadowed the reaction of his son. Dillon was so blown away by his first, and then immediate second, Lucas Oil Series victory that he called the postrace ceremonies “kind of a blur” and admitted that he “really thought I could pass out down there.”
But McCowan could be excused for finding his success hard to grasp. It was, in truth, quite an unexpected explosion into the limelight for the youngster. He excelled as a teenager in the open-wheel modified division and has shown clear flashes of high-level potential in the Dirt Late Model ranks since making the switch in disciplines four years ago, but the fact is, before his back-to-back wins, he hadn’t even finished in the top-five of a full-field Lucas Oil Series feature in 49 career starts.
With McCowan’s Lucas Oil performance record prior to the Wheatland weekend showing six full-field top-10 finishes this season and 11 top-10s overall, there was no indication that he was on the verge of bursting into victory lane. He had no near-miss heartbreakers yet on his ledger. Yes, the 3/8-mile Lucas Oil Speedway is the track he cut his racing teeth on and knows best, but who would have believed he was ready to win there against the country’s best touring drivers?
McCowan can’t say he thought the moment was at hand for him last month. But halfway into his rookie season on the Lucas Oil circuit after an abbreviated attempt to run the World of Outlaws Late Model Series in 2025, he believed he was starting to creep toward increased relevance. A few top-10s, a few nights mixing it up near the front of the field, let him know he was on the right path.
“You kind of feel the shift in things where you’re like, ‘OK, we can run with these guys and have good runs where don’t feel so out of place. We know we can do it even though we're a young team and inexperienced or whatever,’” McCowan said. “Wins obviously build a lot of confidence, but I think running top-10 consistently builds more confidence than anything because you’re back there racing and dicing it up and whatnot. There’s a lot of moves that I feel like I make that I’m like, ‘Man, I wish I could go back and watch that on camera. I had a good move there.’
“Me and (fellow series regular) Brian Shirley were talking about it … we were like, it’s so tough to even run inside the top 10 on this deal, so that’s been our main goal. I try not to set the expectations too high because then I can really get down, because it's easy to do with these guys. I always say there’s 12 good guys that can win on any given night.
“Really the whole goal no matter what when we come into this thing was just try to be consistently in the top 10,” he continued. “And I feel like we’ve done a decent job of staying inside the top 10. We’ve definitely had nights that I maybe I didn’t do my job to the best of my ability that I could have, or the car just wasn’t right, but a lot of these tracks we’ve never been to — most of them, actually — so we’re just trying to build our notebook.”
McCowan’s full-time crew is just as green to national touring as he is. His crew chief, Riley Duncan, is 22, and his other mechanic, former Garrett Alberson wrench Chasin Luther, is 20. They’re all inexperienced and learning together “at the same rate,” McCowan said.
But McCowan and Co. have received some valuable guidance through relationships they’ve developed with other Lucas Oil Series travelers. Alberson is one. The New Mexico driver and his car owner, Ken Roberts, have preached patience to McCowan, counseling him that figuring out the national tour is a “four-year process.” McCowan has also grown close to defending series champion Devin Moran, who has not only provided sage advice but also welcomed McCowan into his shop in Dresden, Ohio, during the team’s extended stints away from home.
“Big shoutout to Devin Moran and his guys,” McCowan said. “They’ve kind of taken us under their wing. That’s fun, to have somebody to run up and down the road with. You know, when we’re trucking all night, it helps a lot. You don’t feel like you're out here on this island by yourself, and that helps keep everybody in a pretty good mood. Like, if I have a bad night, they’re picking us up and keeping our morale up. And I’m not saying that Devin has many bad nights, but we try to do the same for them, try to keep the spirits high between both of us.
“With Devin and them, it’s been so nice having somebody to bounce ideas off or whatever. Maybe I don’t have the greatest ideas and they’ll be like, ‘No, you may not want to go down that road,’ but it’s great to have somebody there.”
McCowan is quick to note that his two-win burst at Wheatland, which sits just 20 minutes from his home, was an enormous cumulative effort.
“It takes so many people,” McCowan said. “I did a little interview with one of the guys around the house, and I was like, ‘I want to thank everybody that helped me come up to this point.’ Every single person, you know, whether it be I borrowed a spindle from somebody or whatever, it took all those little things and every single aspect of it to get me to that point.
“It’s just not, like, well, in the last year or whatever. It was like my whole career. If one little thing got thrown off or whatever, I wouldn’t be in that position to do what I did. So just thank you to everybody that’s helped me up to this point, and hopefully we can keep making everybody proud.”
McCowan singled out several people for their assistance. One, “of course,” as he said, was Peculiar, Mo.-based engine builder Scott Bailey, who was in fact the first person to greet McCowan in victory lane when he emerged from his car after his first win of the weekend at Wheatland.
“He’s at every race he could possibly get to,” McCowan said of Bailey, who embraced McCowan after his triumph. “He was there Saturday during the day (at Wheatland) — he changed the valve springs in that motor before we went out there — and him and my dad stood up there together pacing (during the races), so I guarantee you they wore their shoes out there that weekend.
“He’s been a very, very, very big part of this. I was glad we could get his first Lucas Oil national win for him. Our first Show-Me 100 (in 2023) we ran sixth, had that good weekend, and that was one of Scott’s motors and it was like 14 years old. Scott builds a good piece and I trust him with anything that I do in my Late model. I’ll be with him for as long as he's building motors.”
McCowan gave credit to VG Performance suspension specialist Vinny Guliani, who has been working with McCowan for several years.
“The first time we went out to Vado (for the Wild West Shootout at the New Mexico track), he came out with us,” McCowan said. “He saw our shock and had to show me how to put together shocks. Like we knew nothing. I didn’t even know that stacked springs was a thing you know.”
And McCowan hailed another well-known technical consultant, former Dirt Late Model driver Keith Berner, who operates AfterBurner Performance in Millersburg, Ohio.
“He’s kind of guided us in the right direction,” McCowan said of Berner. “It seems like he asks us questions that’s really going to make us think. He won’t give us stuff, like say, ‘OK, just do this.’ He makes us work for it, and that’s what makes it stick. He's been a very big part of our deal.”
McCowan has absorbed information and knowledge from so many sources.
“It takes me getting out of my shell and asking all these questions and talking to people and trying to figure out what we need to do here or whatever,” McCowan said. “I’m happy we’re just showing a little bit of progress.”
McCowan is especially pleased to have made his father proud. He admits that, like seemingly all fathers and sons, they’ve “had some knockdown, dragout moments” throughout Dillon’s racing days, which began in go-karts when he was 7 years old. “We’ve about thrown down at the truck stop sometimes,” said McCowan, who added that, more than once, he’s ridden home from the track with his mother because he wasn’t seeing eye-to-eye with his father after a night of racing.
But McCowan said he considers his father his “best friend,” and he knows that he wouldn’t be pursuing life as a full-time Dirt Late Model driver if it wasn’t for his dear ‘ol dad. And he sharing those victories at Wheatland with his father is something he “wouldn’t trade for the world.”
“Dad, was so excited,” said McCowan, who sits 14th in the Lucas Oil Series points standings (and second to Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky., in the Rookie of the Year battle) as he returns to action on the circuit with this weekend’s Sunoco North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky. “My dad's always had my back on stuff, and so it felt like it come full circle.
“There’s been so many sleepless nights, and dad, he’s so competitive. He was like, ‘Whatever happens, now we can say that we’ve done it.’ And he’s right. We’re not just another guy that tried and failed. I feel like we’ve done it, so now everything until when I retire, it’s just a cherry on top. I feel accomplished, like we finally done what we set out to do, you know? I had one goal in mind from the time I was 12 … like I knew what I wanted to do, and that’s win one of these national Late Model races.”
There’s still so much ahead of McCowan, but now he’s a different driver. He’s a Lucas Oil Series winner.
“It’s just, you feel you feel a little more respected,” McCowan said. “It’s a weird feeling, honestly. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a breath of fresh air. I don’t feel like I look like a little kid walking around here with all these guys.”
