Batesville Motor Speedway
Flat-plagued Batesville roils Topless 100 drivers
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Batesville competitors in Friday's prelims. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
LOCUST GROVE, Ark. (Aug. 14) — The flat tires came hot and heavy during Friday’s twin 25-lap semifeatures for the Ace Doran Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway.
At least eight flats among six drivers in the first preliminary. Four more in the second race. Leaders knocked out of both semis. Two contending drivers in the first one felled by flats twice.
What was the explanation? What caused so much angst and frustration to start a $50,000-to-win crown jewel weekend?
Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., the two-time and defending Topless 100 champion at the home track of team owner Lance Landers, offered perhaps the most succinct commentary on the situation.
“It’s just Batesville,” said Davenport, who suffered a flat right-rear tire in his heat race but avoided the problem in a 10th-to-third run in the second semifeature. “It’s just what happens.”
Davenport, 42, has made plenty of starts at the high-banked, 3/8-mile oval in his career — including earlier this season when he swept May’s Comp Cams Super Dirt Series-sanctioned Bad Boy 98 weekend — so he’s well versed in the track’s reputation for testing the longevity and durability of tires. It’s part of the game at Batesville, as much as J.D., and his fellow competitors, hate it.
But Davenport also acknowledged that Friday’s outbreak of flats in two short sprint races went beyond most race nights at Batesville. It wasn’t a wear issue but rather a rash of tires cut down by something on the track, which would most likely point to troublesome rocks.
“They put more dirt on it, and there’s even more rocks,” Davenport said, noting that the track had a reworked surface already in place when he made his spring appearance. “Somebody said they dug it up again this week. I don't know if that’s true or not, but that just brings the rocks back up again. Like coming down this front straightaway, it looks like a little rock quarry.”
Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., who won Friday’s second semifeature, said rocks were visible to a driver’s naked eye, albeit only during caution periods. He thus put extra focus into identifying potential trouble spots while circling the track at slower speeds.
“It was kind of the same as Florence last week,” Thornton said, referring to the worry of rock-induced flats during the Kentucky track’s Sunoco North-South 100 weekend. “There’s so many rocks on the racetrack that, when you’re racing, you can’t see them, but under yellow, you can see them and kind of dodge them. So it’s like under yellow, you’re trying to do your best to see what your crew guys are telling you and dodge the rocks on the racetrack.
“The problem, they’re small enough where it’s not worth stopping to (alert an official and) have a guy pick them up, but it could potentially cause a flat.”
The first 25-lapper was inundated with flat tires. Four of the 36-minute race’s nine caution flags were triggered by cars slowing with right-rear flats, starting with Kyle Bronson’s on lap four. Brandon Sheppard pulled up lame running second on lap 18, followed by Terry Phillips on lap 19, leader Devin Moran on lap 20 and Josh Rice, who had climbed up to third, on lap 21. Second-running Chris Ferguson and Sheppard (for a second time) pitted with flats during Moran’s caution period and Ferguson pitted again during Rice’s caution.
Sheppard’s multiple flats — leaving him with a ninth-place finish that puts him in a Saturday B-main — exasperated his Rocket1 team owner Mark Richards, who was seen huddling with Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series director Rick Schwallie after the night’s action to discuss the situation (as well as alert Schwallie to two spare tires on the Rocket1 four-wheeler that a bad actor apparently slashed sometime during the night). Richards said he was even willing to get on a grader and help Batesville promoter Mooney Starr improve the surface, which Richards noted was also choppy and wavy in spots, like he did earlier this year at Mansfield (Ohio) Speedway.
The tire problems calmed down during the second semifeature as the track surface became shinier and slowed down from its supersonic speeds earlier but didn’t totally disappear. Dan Ebert was forced pitside while leading on lap eight due to a punctured right-rear, and between laps 11 and 15 flats took down Sam Seawright, Daniel Hilsabeck and Brian Shirley.
“I mean, it’s just flip of a coin, right?” Ebert said of his fate after settling for an eighth-place finish. “We watched that feature before and saw all the flats, so it’s … you just hate to say it, but you’re kind of a sitting duck.
“It’s just crazy, all the flats. I hate it for everybody. I hate it for Batesville. I mean, obviously they don’t want this. Nobody wants this.”
Theories abounded about the reason for the rocky situation, theories that went beyond the application of new dirt.
“You can see all the rocks here in the pits, and those are what’s on the racetrack,” Thornton said. “Like, we drag them out with us.”
Max Blair of Centerville, Pa., who survived the first semifeature’s tire woes unscathed for a $5,000 victory, wondered if there was something to Thornton’s thought.
“I don’t know if there’s something in the racetrack that just some guys ran over,” said Blair, who returned to his trailer after hot laps with a brand new tire flat. “I don’t know if we’re putting tiny little punctures in them through the pits because there’s so many rocks in the pits, maybe? And like some of us are parked (seemingly) a half a mile away (From the track), so we’re driving through the pits a long ways.”
Could some subtle changes to the track’s layout be a factor? The racing surface on the frontstretch, for instance, doesn’t go right to the outside wall; there’s several feet from the lip of the track to the concrete that actually has grass growing on it.
“They’ve reshaped it a little bit,” said Thornton, who will start the Topless 100 from the pole position with his buddy Blair alongside. “Like you used to get all the way to the wall. Well, now you don’t really get all the way to the wall on the frontstretch. Because when you got to the wall, it used to be smoother out there, and like a half-lane down was kind of rough. Now it kind of goes off-camber the higher you get.
“And like all the way into turn one against the wall, it’s like super dirty, just because it does shelf off, so you get one or two cars out there and you really kick up a lot of (rocks) back on the racetrack.”
Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., who was the runner-up in the second 25-lapper, noticed the dirty area against the homestretch wall.
“We try to stay off of the wall a little bit because that is where the rocks come from,” O’Neal said. “You get so high up there and it’s just all built up and rough, so you try to stay out of that area. It’s about 2 or 3 feet right there and it’s not even graded.”
O’Neal was hopeful for Saturday’s Topless 100 after seeing the frequency of flats die down as the second semi wore on.
“Obviously, as we run all the way across a racetrack, we keep throwing (rocks) out,” O’Neal said. “The first feature got most of the rocks down in the bottom and threw them out across the racetrack and then off the racetrack. I think that’s probably the reason why we saw it level off the flats at the very end of our race, just because it got clean enough where there was no rocks being thrown.
“It’s going to be a crapshoot” in the long-distance finale, he added. “It’s unfortunate that sometimes these races can may be decided by flat tires and stuff, but I’m sure they'll work out tomorrow. They’ll try and pick some rocks out of it if that's even what’s causing it, but that’s our assumption anyway.”
The always perceptive 60-year-old veteran Dale McDowell of Chickamagua, Ga., carefully considered the situation while sitting on the back of is trailer at the end of Friday’s program.
“I know they added dirt, changed the banking up a little bit,” said McDowell, who rallied to finish fifth in the first semifeature after an early restart scrape with Blair sent him spinning on the homestretch. “I mean, obviously something’s causing flats, so maybe it’s shell rock or something that’s come up.
“There wasn’t as many flats in the second (semi), but I think it’s because the racetrack actually cleaned up, the groove got wider, less wheelspin. When you’re wheelspinning and stuff’s floating around, rocks or small rocks or whatever, it’s easier to cut a tire.”
McDowell, a Topless 100 winner in 2004 and ’23, was hopeful that Saturday’s finale will not be filled with flat tires, but he’s also concerned that there will be some worrisome stretches.
“It’s liable to go back through a phase in the race where it starts getting a little cleaner, it gets a little grip, and then it’ll start with the flats again,” said McDowell, who starts ninth in the Topless 100. “When it goes through that stage where it burns the grease off of it and you’re moving around chasing grip. throwing stuff everywhere, that’s where you’re going to see your most flats.
“It’s a challenge to prep a track. I mean, racetracks are hard. They’re hard to keep up with, so it’s easy for the race fan and the racer to point out problems. I owned one, so I know. It’s just like a set up of a race car. You’re guessing at it all the time, and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t.
“We’re dealt what we’re dealt,” he concluded, “so we just have to work our way through it and see what happens.”
Added Davenport: “Maybe by tomorrow, I think it’ll be OK. We’ll just have to see, but you’ll just have to know where to run and where not to run until you have to. That’s just the way Batesville’s always been.”
