Florence Speedway
Switch to Rocket fuels Rice's Florence moment
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Josh Rice in Florence's victory lane. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
UNION, Ky. (Aug. 7) — Josh Rice still hasn’t won the Big One at Florence Speedway, but the Sunoco North-South 100 weekend race he did capture in front of his home crowd on Friday created a memory he’ll carry forever.
Winning a 25-lap semifeature with a stirring last-circuit pass of four-time North-South 100 winner Bobby Pierce. Sending his fans into a frenzy. Doing it in his second night back behind the wheel of a Rocket Chassis. | RaceWire
It was all just so … amazing.
“I’ve wanted to do something like that so bad for so many years,” said Rice, a 28-year-old from nearby Crittenden, Ky., who has been entering the North-South 100 since 2015. “Hopefully we can do it again tomorrow.”
Saturday’s $75,000-to-win finale was of course on Rice’s mind after he earned $6,000 for snatching victory from Oakwood, Ill.’s Pierce in Friday’s second semifeature, but he allowed himself to savor the special scene he created for himself, his family, his team and his supporters. He understood the momentous nature of his accomplishment, no matter the distance. It’s not every day a driver pulls off a last-lap maneuver to beat the No. 1-ranked Dirt Late Model racer in the land in a drag race to the finish line.
“I just knew if I could hit it right one time I could slide him. It just happened to be on the white-flag lap,” Rice said, standing alongside his JRR Motorsports No. 11 during postrace technical inspection at the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series trailer as a horde of fans stood on the periphery waiting for their moment with him. “But that’s hard to do. That little Bobby’s good. He’s tough about everywhere, so I’m pumped.”
Rice said he screamed with joy inside his helmet after nipping Pierce by 0.252 of a second. Combined with the celebratory yell he emitted when he climbed onto to the roof of his car in victory lane, it’s no wonder his voice was a little hoarse as he spoke after the race.
Speaking a bit rough mattered little to Rice, though. He was overcome with so much emotion that he was almost in a dream world, one that ratified his return to the Rocket fold where he’s spent the majority of his career after spending the first seven months of his rookie Lucas Oil Series season with James Rattliff’s Campbellsville, Ky.-based driving Longhorn Chassis.
“I feel like I kind of took all my chips and just threw them all in,” Rice said of debuting a Rocket machine at Florence. “I think we needed to switch and obviously it worked out. Hopefully it continues to show moving forward.
“I think it’s going to be like putting on an old pair of shoes,” he added. “I think we’re going to be fine.”
Rice emphasized that he had hoped to find a synchronicity in the Longhorn cars like he’s long possessed with Rockets. But while he showed speed with the China Grove, N.C.-based brand that constituted the entire JRR Motorsports program when he joined the team last fall for his long-awaited shot at national touring, he couldn’t quite get himself fully comfortable in the vehicles.
“It’s so hard for everybody because, I mean, Longhorns, they’ve got like 80 percent of the field and they win all the time, and it’s just like, man, I’ve done this for seven years (in Rockets) … it takes years to get good, and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere in that Longhorn stuff,” Rice said. “It wasn’t bad. I mean, (VG Performance technical consultant) Vinny (Guliani) got us really close (after his services were obtained following Georgia-Florida Speedweeks), and everybody’s like, ‘Man, you’re running good. You’re running eighth, 10th,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s not good enough. I want to run better.’
“Obviously, I didn’t want to ask James (Rattliff) to switch over (to Rocket) at the beginning of the year because I didn’t know if that was a dealbreaker or not. I wanted to give (Longhorn cars) a fair chance, and, I mean, hell, we won a Lucas race (on May 22 at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo.). We weren’t that bad. But it’s mainly a consistency thing. We’re either really good or really bad, and how you win points isn’t like that. I feel like you got to be competitive about everywhere you go.”
Rice just thinks there’s something innate within that pairs well with Rocket cars.
“It’s so weird. It’s such a driver feel thing,” Rice said. “I think the information that I have and the experience that I have in these cars, and then using (Rocket co-owner) Mark (Richards), obviously, I think it’s going the right direction.”
According to Rice, his relationship with Richards never frayed as he campaigned Longhorns this year.
“Honestly, even with me being in the Longhorn stuff, I felt like I was closer to Mark than I'd ever been,” said Rice, whose first season as a Lucas Oil Series regular has put him on the road and in close contact with Richards. “I would always try to bounce some ideas off him, and I feel like Mark’s always wanted me to run good so he’s even kind of helped me in the Longhorn stuff in a way — obviously he’s not giving me setup stuff, but he’s given me advice.
“We’ve followed him around. We parked next to him (the Rocket Chassis house car team) a few times. He’s been really good help. It’s been really cool actually.”
Richards acknowledged at least one instance this season when some simple guidance he provided Rice directly hurt his own team and driver Brandon Sheppard.
“It actually cost me at Fairbury,” Richards said, referring to July 22’s FloRacing Night in America event at the Illinois track. “He was lining up to qualify, and I said, ‘Hey, man, whatever you do, don’t miss that bottom. Just make sure you just slow up enough for it.’ He was getting ready to burn the top, because afterwards he told me, ‘All my guys was telling me to burn the top.’ And he ran that one lap in the bottom and he qualified good and then he beat us in the heat race (and later finished second, to Sheppard’s fifth, in the feature).
“But it don’t matter. Guys like him, they’ve been loyal customers of ours, and we’re happy to help.”
Richards added that he “knew what the situation was” when Rice’s ride opportunity took him to Longhorn Chassis. He realized Rice’s affinity for Rockets might someday lead him back.
“I feel like he's been a Rocket guy, and the last Rocket car that he drove was a new XR2 car at Eldora (last October) for Bruce Kane,” Richards said of Rice’s victory in the Steel Block Late Model event on the Dirt Track World Championship undercard. “We set that car up. They never touched it. He said that was one of the easiest driving cars he ever drove.”
With backing from longtime sponsor Glenwood Electric helping to take some of the initial financial pressure of a chassis changeover off Rattliff, a deal was arranged over the last month for Rocket to build him a car. He went to the Rocket shop in Shinnston, W.Va., with his JRR crew on Aug. 2 to install his motor, oil system and other components, then took it back to his shop in Crittenden, Ky., to continue preparing it. Richards arrived at Rice’s garage on Tuesday to offer in-depth assistance and the whole Rocket1 crew — Danny White, Austin Hargrove and Joel Rogers — came on Wednesday and worked with Rice and Co. until 1 a.m. to ready it for Thursday’s North-South 100 opener.
“It was awesome,” Rice said of the hands-on Rocket help he received. “That’s kind of like when you feel like you’ve made it, when you got Mark at your shop.”
This would be Rice’s first time running a Rocket XR2 model in Super Late Model competition — he previously drove Rocket XR1 and XR1.2 designs — but his conversations with Richards and fellow driver Tyler Erb buoyed his confidence in the company’s latest offering.
“They said you can do the same type of stuff as you did to the XR1’s and these 2’s are just better,” Rice said. “I’m like, ‘Well, that’s perfect.’ And looking at some of the (setup) numbers that Mark’s ran, he’s right on kind of the stuff I ran, just different strings and the shocks and stuff.”
Rice had some early trouble when he busted out the new car on Thursday — notably, he had to replace his seatbelts after qualifying due to a problem — but he went on to finish third in the first 25-lap semifeature won by Sheppard after a harder right-rear tire choice hampered him on restarts.
Then came Rice’s magical Friday night. He not only pulled off a last-lap slider on Pierce entering turn three after Pierce opened the door by losing some momentum in turn one and bouncing off turn two to dull his speed for a final crossover attempt at the other end of the track. He also found that the car responded to the tweaks he made on it.
“I kind of went out of my box just a little bit tonight from Mark’s (setup),” Rice said. “I kind of went with what I felt like from years past and I just barely tinkered with it, and I feel like I was really good. And that was my biggest thing with the Longhorns — I feel like I couldn’t adjust on them. Every time I adjusted, I screwed it up.”
Two races into his Rocket return, Rice already could feel what the new car offers him.
“It’s really good,” Rice said. “It wants to be drove a different way. You can tell what it wants, so I’m having to adapt to it a little bit. I feel like the XR1’s I'm used to, the harder you drive them, the better they are. And I feel like these, you almost got to tell yourself to back it down a little bit and it steers a lot better.
“And Mark told me tonight, he’s like, ‘Before you go change back (the setup) to how you know, just give it a chance.’ And I did. It worked out. I haven’t felt controlled to the cushion in a long time, so I think me learning and getting more seat time, it’s going to work out. I really do. I feel really good.”
For all Rice’s success at Florence over the past decade — including two Lucas Oil Series victories in the Ralph Latham Memorial — he’s largely struggled in the North-South 100. His preliminary nights in recent years have been especially frustrating, contributing to a performance record in the 100-lapper that shows a personal-best fifth-place finish in 2021 but no other result better than 14th in his eight career starts.
“I butchered it the last two or three years,” Rice said of Florence’s crown jewel event. “I think ’21 was the last time I actually felt like I had a chance of winning it. We’ve screwed this weekend up so many times just with trying to break out new cars and doing dumb s--- we normally don’t do here, and the track’s thrown curveballs out us and everything else.
“This is my fourth year in a row breaking out a brand new car (including a Longhorn he tried in ’24 just on opening night), so I told my one buddy, I was like, ‘It’s like going to a casino. You just keep putting it on black. Eventually it’s got to hit black.’”
So far, so good, on the racing roulette wheel for Rice, who starts fourth in Saturday’s third heat due to the inversion from event points accumulated in the preliminaries. He’s confident he has a car capable of contending for his elusive first North-South victory, especially if he lands a starting spot near the front of the 100-lapper.
“I haven’t been very good in 100-lap races, but I feel like right now I got a car that I can ride around for a little while and not be 20th when I decide to take off,” Rice said. “I feel like when I try to ride for the last few weeks, few months, I think, Hell, I’m in 20th, I can’t even ride, so I gotta blast the cushion just to be a contender. Hopefully I can I can hit it right tomorrow where I don’t have to do that crazy stuff to keep up.
“I mean, I think we pretty much proved that we could do that tonight. I didn’t really come off the cushion much, but I feel like when I did, I was really good. Just got to make the right calls on it, so yeah, looking forward to it.”
And while experiencing the utter excitement of his semifeature victory, Rice even let his mind wander to what winning Saturday’s finale would feel like at the King family-owned track.
“It’s crazy,” he said of his raucous reaction from his fans. “Josh King better buy some better bleachers because they might tear these down tomorrow if I do that.”
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