Kevin Kovac's Take Five
Take Five: North-South had its share of rollovers
In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):
No. 1: Jerry Rice of Verona, Ky., knows Florence Speedway as well as anyone, so it bears noting when his synopsis of the 2026 Sunoco North-South 100 weekend brought out a particular them beyond his on Josh’s otherworldly performance to win the crown jewel event for the first time. “Like I’ve been coming here since I was 5 years old,” the former standout driver said amid his son’s raucous postrace celebration in the pit area. “This is our home turf. I’ve never seen so many bad flips and just crazy stuff all weekend. It’s just like, What in the world?” Rice nailed it — there was an inordinate number of especially wild wrecks each night of the weekend, including Dillon McCowan’s flip out of the ballpark Thursday and Michael Leach’s high-flying barrel rolls Friday. For Saturday’s finale, Trevor Landrum and Jason Jameson flipped in tandem during heat action and, of course, Dan Ebert’s mechanical trouble trigger a massive wreck on a lap-12 restart of the 100-lapper that collected more than half of the 27-car field. What brought on the outbreak of mayhem? The track surface was fast and had some challenging spots, but Rice didn’t think it should be held responsible for an unexpectedly rough weekend. It just seemed it was one of those racing stretches when things just go a bit haywire.
No. 2: The Landrum-Jameson encounter during Saturday’s second heat might have been the strangest crash of the weekend. It was reminiscent of the infamous tangle during the 2016 Prairie Dirt Classic non-qualifiers’ race at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway that saw Tyler Erb smash into Ryan Unzicker entering turn one, causing the two cars to start flipping in different directions. I immediately thought back to that crash after Landrum’s contact with Jameson’s left-rear corner entering turn three sent the two cars flying in the unusual manner of Erb and Unzicker, although the initial contact Erb made with Unzicker a decade ago was more direct than this instance. The Landrum and Jameson machines essentially rolled over each other in the wreck with both cars landing upside down — another rare occurrence to see two cars lying of their roof.
No. 3: Florence, Ky.’s Landrum said the wreck was so wild that he “didn’t know where I ended up on the racetrack.” All he could grasp about it was that he thought “Jameson got in the wall down the back straightaway there, and then once he got in the wall it turned him down the racetrack, which I don’t know if he knew I was I was there or not.” It was just the second and more severe rollover of Landrum’s career. “This one got me a little sore, but it definitely junked the race car,” said Landrum, who was gunning for his third career North-South 100 feature start but first since 2021. “The (cage) halo and everything did its job. Longhorn builds a safe race car, but everything around it is junk — driveshaft, lift bar, oil tank, snapped the rear end in half, shocks, bar … it hurt it.” Landrum reported that the car was the lone vehicle in his arsenal because he sold his last Team Zero Chassis earlier this year, throwing the remainder of his season into limbo. “We’re second in Northern Allstars (Late Model Series) points, so I don’t know where we’re gonna end up at,” he said.
No. 4: Lawrenceburg, Ky.’s Jameson seemed to chalk the tangle up as a racing accident. “I come down a little bit, and he was diving her in there,” said Jameson, who was chasing his 10th North-South 100 start one year after scoring a career-best sixth-place finish. “I got in the wall, barely, but obviously everybody was going to the bottom so I had to get to the bottom. I left him a line down there and maybe he ran in there a little harder than he had to, and he kind of got sideways and he shoved … but part of it.” Jameson said he was unhurt but admitted to being “out of breath” because he’s “too old to be hanging upside down like that.” His JRR Motorsports Longhorn Chassis, however, was thoroughly beaten up. “It knocked the whole halo down. It landed solid on the cage,” he said, adding that “we ain’t got no plans” moving forward so they’ll “just regroup and go from here.”
No. 5: There was one notable near-miss accident during the North-South 100 weekend that would have been especially memorable. After Brandon Overton crossed under the checkered flag to complete a last-lap pass of Mike Marlar to win Friday’s first 25-lap semifeature, he sailed into turn one and came oh-so-close to disaster. I saw his Riggs Motorsports car bounce hard into the air and asked him about it afterward. He responded with a relieved smile knowing that he escaped a flip that would have been one heck of a way to top off his first victory since April 15. “I was so excited, I was like, ‘Hell yeah,’ so I just go down there (into turn one) and …” Overton said. “And I hit (a hole), and I was like, ‘Holy s---!’ I felt that. It kind of took my breath away. That would’ve been something — win the race and barrel-roll that thing.”
.webp?v=2.0.5)
