Port Royal Speedway
Skid over, J.D. weighs his equipment options
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Jonathan Davenport (49) leads Ricky Thornton Jr. (20rt). (Clifford Dove)
PORT ROYAL, Pa. (Aug. 29) — Jonathan Davenport hasn’t felt like he’s been in a slump. It’s hard to keep the idea from circulating through the public Dirt Late Model sphere, though, when a driver of his superstar pedigree goes over two months and 17 starts without a victory. | RaceWire
A flag-to-flag triumph in Saturday’s 50-lap Rumble by the River finale at Port Royal Speedway — an especially rich one worth $50,000 — squashed any murmurings about the strength of the 42-year-old from Blairsville, Ga., and the rationality of his decision to spend the 2026 season racing when and where he desires rather than chasing a national tour.
Davenport is just as good as ever. He just went through a short summer drought, stuck at 13 wins for longer than he preferred.
“There was a point where we were struggling a little bit when we went north with the (World of) Outlaws,” Davenport said, referring to the June 22-30 stretch in Minnesota and North Dakota during which he finished no better than fifth in five events. “That trip was awesome — that’s what this year was all about, was going to new places and doing new things — but we didn’t run very well. We found out what our problem was so we’d obviously like to have all those back, but we’ve moved on and licked our wounds.”
And Davenport and his Double L Motorsports squad entered Saturday’s big-money Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series show with the feeling that “we’ve been really good here lately” despite J.D. being winless since June 20 in a Midwest LateModel Racing Association feature at Salina (Okla.) Highbanks Speedway — his longest dry spell within a season since going 17 starts without a checkered flag between July 15 and Sept. 3, 2023.
“We had a lot of close opportunities,” Davenport said of his recent returns. “We felt like we probably should have won Florence (Aug. 8’s Sunoco North-South 100) if things would have worked out. We had an opportunity to win Batesville (Aug. 15’s Topless 100), but that’s a crap shoot there, nobody knew who was gonna win with flat tires. We was OK there (Aug. 22) at Maquoketa the second night (of a WoO doubleheader).
“We felt really good last night, too,” he added, looking back to a third-place finish in Friday’s 40-lap weekend opener at Port Royal. “Just circumstantial, didn’t win the heat, and then obviously we drove up there pretty good from 13th and felt really good about our chances tonight going into today.”
Davenport’s confidence for the finale was indeed well placed. He “qualified a lot faster than what we thought we would” to earn fast-time honors and then won the fourth heat, which put him outside the front row alongside Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., the $10,000 victor on Friday riding a four-race Lucas Oil Series win streak at Port Royal over the past two years.
Was Davenport worried about Thornton? He knew his rival would be tough, but he sensed the half-mile oval’s surface would be more to his own wheelhouse.
“I felt what we was really good, but also, he’s been living on the top (lane) a lot, too, here,” Davenport said of Thornton. “I felt like we had a couple shots at him here a couple years ago, but he’s been really good around the top here. I can’t quite run the top as good as he could, but the last time I won this race (in 2024), I think maybe Hudson (O’Neal) was behind me and we was, you know, beating the wall down and that’s how we won it, so we can run up there.
“But I was hoping that’s not how this place is going to transition every race. Fortunate for us, it definitely moved back to the middle tonight. It probably wasn’t as racy as it normally is tonight, but it worked out for me.”
Davenport outgunned Thornton for the lead at the initial green flag and never was headed, leading every lap with little threat from Thornton, who finished a distant 3.136 seconds behind in second. Davenport ran one of his trademark races, so smoothly rolling through the middle of the track, seemingly always in full control.
“I think I was a little bit on the free side, but it made me be able to rotate really well and not abuse my tires any,” Davenport said. “Normally when they’re a little free they’re easier to drive like that. If I would have had to hustle it any, I don’t know that I had a whole lot more left. I still wasn’t going 100 percent, but we was going just fast enough, you know, to try to keep putting a little bit of distance between me and whoever was behind me.”
The original start, of course, was the key for Davenport, who put himself in clean air by surging ahead of Thornton. But it also offered the race’s biggest dose of intrigue because Thornton felt it should have been called back because Davenport fired early.
When Thornton, 35, pulled his Koehler Motorsports car to the side of Davenport’s postrace celebration on Port Royal’s stage, he was clearly very agitated with the feature’s outcome. He initially angrily declined an interview with a reporter, but after cooling off he discussed the race on the FloRacing broadcast with pit reporter Chris Moore. Thornton relayed his belief that Davenport should have been penalized for jumping because “usually when second place arcs out and beats you to the cone and fires way before you, they call it back,” and he also quipped that “maybe (series owner) Flo needs to hire a couple of guys to watch over in turn four.”
Davenport was a bit taken aback when told of Thornton’s distress with the original start. Reviewing the race inside his trailer afterward, J.D. calmly went through his view of the race’s first green flag.
“I don’t think I went early because (Thornton) went really late in the box,” Davenport said, referring to the start “zone” in turn four in which the leader can fire.
Davenport was hyper-aware of the start’s importance, though.
“So obviously, you know, it’s for 50 grand,” Davenport said. “I'm going to do everything I can to get to turn one first, and honestly, I was rolling him (rolling to the start zone), but I got a little separation and come back to him, and I could tell he was wanting to slow down to try to break my momentum, so I kept slowing down with him.
“But he just waited to really, really late in the box, and I felt like when he took off, I just timed it just perfect. You know, the video may say something different. I don't know. But from my vantage point, I timed it perfect. From his vantage point, I probably jumped a little bit. But the way I feel like he slowed down and took off real late in the box real, real low, I had a little bit of banking to run down (for momentum).
“My plan was just to, if he did get me on the start, I figured he would go in there and float to the outside, so I was going to try to get turned off the cushion early and then, you know, try to cross him back down the back straightway,” he continued. “But once I came down the front straightaway, I couldn’t see him anyway, so I just kind of floated through the middle. I didn’t want to go all the way to the cushion and hang a little bit, so I tried to block his air, get into one, and just kind of hang out in the middle.”
Davenport handled the race’s five restarts with aplomb, never giving Thornton an opening to dive-bomb him in the corners. Thornton made a last-ditch bid to ring the top of turns one and two on the final restart, on lap 37, but there wasn’t enough grip there and he nearly clipped the wall exiting turn two as Davenport powered away.
There was plenty of horsepower under the hood of Davenport’s Longhorn Chassis to keep him in front with a quite fresh Vic Hill-constructed engine sitting in its framerails. It was his third night running the Hill motor, which the Lance Landers-owned team recently added to his arsenal of Cornett and Clements engines.
“I ran this car last week at Maquoketa the second night, so that was the first time I’d run this engine (before the Port Royal weekend),” Davenport said. “But I’d ran Vic’s stuff a few times when I drove for Donald Bradsher a few times. He had his stuff.
“We just worked out a deal with this engine. They wanted to build something that suited my style. We had to work on it a little bit from yesterday. The way it was, it got us in a little bit of trouble in that heat race, so we tuned on a little bit and changed some things today and got it a little better.”
Davenport said the goal with the Hill engine was to load it with “just the characteristics I like.”
“That’s what we just told him, and that's what we wanted him to build,” Davenport said. “I don’t know that he changed up a whole lot more than he normally does, but I think he did a little bit, just a little bit different carburetor combinations, spacer plate, you know, things like that.
“I’m just learning what rpm range it likes. It’s not no better than anything I got, my Cornetts or Clements, they run awesome. This one runs just a little bit different, but not a whole lot. I don’t know that I’m smart enough that, if I went out in three cars and I had three different engines, the packages I have are so close, I wouldn’t know the difference probably.”
Employing an engine program with multiple builders has been evident among some high-level Dirt Late Model teams in recent years. It’s an approach that began during the height of Covid-19’s supply-chain issues.
“That’s not the way we planned it. It just kind of worked out this way,” Davenport said. “We originally done it back in ’20 and ’21 and everything because of Covid and parts being so hard to get. They was only making so many parts and they was only allowing so many parts out to each engine builder, so we figured, you know, ‘Hey, we’re gonna double-dip a little bit just to help us.’
“Luckily, I’ve got a great car owner that allows us to do that. He seen what we was doing and took advantage of it.”
The performance Davenport enjoyed at Port Royal from the Vic Hill engine and his Longhorn car — a machine he’s raced just five times over the course of the 2026 season — sent him home with a question he might not have expected to have on his mind: What will he run in Sept. 10-12’s World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio?
Typically, this wouldn’t be a question at all. Since the 2021 World 100, Davenport has only raced one car at Eldora, a machine that has brought him so much glory there that he’s named it “Eldora.” It’s largely ready to go another round at the Big E next weekend, but he ran so well at Port Royal, a big track with some Eldora characteristics, that it’s making him wonder if perhaps it might be time to unload something else.
Notable as well is that Davenport’s last crown jewel win at Eldora was 2025’s Dream, which means he’s gone winless in his last three major event starts at the track. He’s never gone four consecutive Eldora crown jewels without a victory since winning his first in the 2015 Dream.
“It’s got me doing some thinking for sure,” Davenport said. “I don’t know … the last race that I ran my Eldora car (before reserving it for Eldora duty) was here (in the 2021 Rumble by the River), and I think it felt awful good. So I’m almost thinking about bringing (Saturday’s winning) car to Eldora.
“We’re just gonna talk it over and see what we’re gonna do. I don’t know yet. We got a couple other opportunities and things we might do. We ain’t gonna let the cat out of the bag yet, but we got something to think about.”
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