Eldora Speedway

Twenty years later, recalling one of the best World 100s

September 9, 2026, 7:13 am

By Kevin Kovac

DirtonDirt senior writer

Earl Pearson Jr. after winning the 2006 World 100. (Brian McLeod)

Twenty years later, the 2006 World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, still resonates. That race was so good, so exciting, so downright memorable, it stands as arguably the best of the 55 editions of Dirt Late Model racing’s most prestigious event.

Earl Pearson Jr., the driver from Jacksonville, Fla., who won the race, knows its stature in Eldora’s, and the division’s, history. | 2006 finish | By the numbers | Slideshow

“It’s crazy how many people still talk about that race today as one of the best at Eldora,” Pearson said. “People say that to me all the time.”

There’s no denying that what transpired Sept. 9, 2006, at Eldora’s hallowed half-mile oval was special. Pearson — then 34 and emerging as a star with two, and soon to be three, consecutive national touring championships on his resume — came out on top of a frenetic, multicar battle at the front of the pack that had the huge crowd in a frenzy throughout the feature’s final 25 laps.

Pearson started from the pole position but didn’t lead a lap until the waning moments, on lap 87, when his cool, calm inside line carried him past several drivers who were in a tornado of competitiveness during the 60-lap green-flag stretch that closed the race. There was Shannon Babb, who led laps 1-26 and 28-80 (Chris Madden paced the one other circuit only to almost immediately slow with a flat tire) and wasn’t backing down as he attempted to gain redemption for losing the previous year’s World 100 because his car weighed in light. There was Jeep Van Wormer, scraping the wall seemingly every lap as he drove his car with wild abandon and rose up to lead laps 81-86. There were others in the mix, too, including a teenage Josh Richards and veterans Clint Smith and Dale McDowell.

Somehow Pearson emerged from the whirlwind to claim the $39,000 first-place prize over Babb. Van Wormer was next in third, his machine’s bodywork battered by his concrete-rubbing bid, followed by Richards and the late Scott Bloomquist, who quietly came from the 22nd starting to overtake Smith for fifth on the final lap. The top-six finishers were all on the same straightaway at the checkered flag.

“It was so back-and-forth, and nobody knew who was gonna win for like that whole race,” recalled Longhorn Chassis technical representative Matt Langston, who was a 26-year-old crewman on Pearson’s Dunn Benson Racing team in 2006. “It was kind of like watching a thriller movie, you know what I mean? And it just kind of had a twist in the end, where Earl just kind of shot in there and just showed his nose and got them all stirred up. They weren’t even talking about him until the end.”

It was the type of race that lives on, a show for that ages that continues to excite every time it’s viewed again on video.

And Pearson, now 54 and no longer racing regularly, will confirm that he never tires of watching that particular replay.

“I’ve watched it a bunch of times,” Pearson said recently. “About two months ago, I watched it again. Somebody sent it to me on my phone, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll sit here and watch this.’ It just brings you right back to feeling like it was that day again, you know? And you’re like, ‘Well, if I’d have done this, if I’d done that, I might could have gotten the lead even earlier.’ ”

Pre-race

Entering the 2006 World 100, Pearson was in his seventh season driving for the late Carlton Lamm’s Dunn Benson Racing based in Dunn, N.C. He had already broken through on the national level in the iconic No. 1 machines with points titles on the Xtreme DirtCar Series in ’04 and the fledgling Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series in ’05, and in ’06 he was on his way to the second of his four consecutive Lucas Oil championships.

The ’06 season was Pearson’s first, though, with fellow Floridian Jason Fitzgerald as his crew chief. Then 30 and single, Fitzgerald was a racer who relocated to North Carolina to work with Langston in the Dunn Benson shop upon Pearson’s invitation.

“I remember I was racing around home and Earl called me and wanted to know if I wanted to be his crew chief,” Fitzgerald recalled. “I told him I wasn’t crew chief material, and he said, ‘Ah, s---, son, you’ll figure it out.’”

Fitzgerald certainly did, proving to be a great fit alongside Pearson and Langston. The team clicked for four wins through the first six months of the ’06 campaign, including a $24,999 score at Kentucky Lake Motor Speedway.

But when Labor Day weekend arrived — the week before the World 100 — they had been winless for over two months. They needed some momentum before heading to Eldora and the holiday weekend provided it.

“We had built a brand new (MasterSbilt) car and we were planning on running in at Eldora, and so the previous weekend before Eldora they had a race at Fayetteville for $5,000-to-win and we went down there with it,” Langston said, referring to a Carolina Clash event at the track closest to the team’s shop along the North Carolina coast. “And I remember this — we were getting the car ready, and Jason was like, ‘Oh s---, we got a problem.’ We noticed that our right-rear axle tube was 2 inches shorter than it was supposed to be.

“And we were like, ‘Well, you know what? We’re gonna run it.’ ”

It became the team’s favorite mistake. Pearson promptly won at Fayetteville “and the car was, like, really good,” said Langston, who before leaving the shop had named the car “Hugo,” a reference to Pearson’s “Hurricane” nickname and the powerful Hurricane Hugo that struck the South Carolina coast in 1989.

The next day Pearson heated up even more, albeit with the team’s other MasterSbilt Race Car and after experiencing a crazy travel odyssey.

“We drove up to the Hillbilly 100 at Tyler County (Speedway in Middlebourne, W.Va.) and we swapped cars at Steve Shaver’s shop (in West Virginia),” Langston recalled. “And oh, man, we had a hell of a mess getting to Tyler County. The promoter had to come get us (and lead them to the track) because the (main) road was shut down and we tried to take this pig path through the mountains with this S&S rig, us and Shaver and (Scott) Bloomquist, and we got all held up.”

The team had just hired a new truck driver, Regan Cobb, that very weekend to take driving duties off of Fitzgerald and Langston, and the Tyler County trek gave the newcomer a real test.

“We had to go through these two-lane roads, up hills, through houses, and this old guy was sitting on his porch,” Fitzgerald recalled. “He waved us down to stop, and was like, ‘You’re not gonna make it.’ So we stopped, and this cat (Cobb) backed the truck the way down the mountain. I was like, ‘Yeah, he knows what he’s doing.’ ”

After arriving late to Tyler County and having to park the hauler amid fans in the parking lot, Pearson won the Hillbilly and its $25,000 check. They had caught fire at a perfect time.

“Obviously when you get on those winning streaks you got confidence,” Fitzgerald said. “But when you get to that place (Eldora), you just kind of go in there and take what you can get.”

There’s certainly no guarantees at Eldora, especially for a driver who might be hot but doesn’t have an extensive track record at the famed speedway. That was the case with Pearson, who, by ’06, had been entering Eldora’s crown jewels for nearly a decade but sported so-so results. At the time he had more DNQs (five) than starts (three) in the Dream — though he had finished a promising fifth in ’05 and eighth in ’06 — and his only previous World 100 feature appearances were in ’03 (ninth) and ’04 (eighth).

Pearson had seen a lot since he started testing himself at Eldora in his mid-20s. He realized it was a unique place very quickly.

“Hell, I remember one year I was behind C.J. Rayburn for inspection,” Pearson said, referring to the legendary late chassis builder and racer. “He unloaded his car and the tech guy said he had to do something to it. He got a sledgehammer out and beat the body, literally beat it in. I’m like, ‘What in the world is going on here?’ But anyway, he went right on through tech after that. I’m like, ‘This is kind of strange,’ but I was young then. I didn’t know what was going on.”

It also took Pearson a while to simply gain experience at Eldora. Before 2013, of course, the Dream and World 100 were two-day shows that began Friday with hot laps and time trials and then on Saturday went right into the heats with no practice laps. Today drivers can accumulate more laps in a preliminary program than Pearson and his generation would sometimes get in an entire weekend at Eldora if they didn’t qualify for the 100-lapper.

“There’s a reason a lot of people didn’t get a lot of laps there back then,” Pearson said. “That’s why it took me so many years to make a race there, because you didn't have no laps.”

Everything began to coalesce for Pearson at the ’06 World 100, though. Back in that MasterSbilt car with the short right-rear axle tube he had driven to victory at Fayetteville, he timed 12th-fastest in the massive 195-car field in Friday’s qualifying and won Saturday’s sixth heat to earn the pole position for the feature.

The pressure of the No. 1 starting spot was real. Both driver and crew chief had some anxiety as feature time approached.

“The one thing I do remember is putting s--- ton of lead on the car before the feature,” Fitzgerald said, well aware that Babb had been stripped of his apparent World 100 win the previous year because he was light at the scales. “I was all stressed out about that, making sure we made weight. I was in there doing all kind of calculations and mounting lead before the feature.”

Pearson, meanwhile, had his own thoughts running through his head.

“I remember Jason told me when he came back after they were warming the cars up on the frontstretch (following driver introductions), Jason was like, ‘I think he's nervous,’ ” Langston said. “We knew we had a good car, but we were kind of like questioning it because the rear end was actually put in that car by mistake.

“But sometimes you learn by mistakes,” he added. “Man, that thing was pretty fast.”

The race

Leading the 28-car field to the green flag didn’t propel Pearson into the top spot. He was outgunned immediately by Babb, his fellow front-row starter, and fell back as far as fourth during the marathon.

“We didn’t hardly make any changes all night, the whole weekend, on the car,” Pearson said. “It’s just, like, everything was just clicking. But in that race, honestly, the first part of it, I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know. We got an average car.’ ”

But Pearson soon determined that his car was indeed much better than average. He had a vehicle capable of winning. He just had to make sure he was there at the end.

“I do remember the start of that race and we fell back a little bit,” Fitzgerald said. “I remember standing down there in turn one like, ‘Well, s---, we’re not going to be good.’ And then a caution came out (there were only three in the race, all by lap 40) and Earl come by and gave me the thumbs up. Usually when he does that, you’re in pretty good shape.

“He was just riding around, being patient. Then he just said, ‘Hell, it’s time to go,’ and off he went.”

Pearson turned up the wick sometime around lap 70 as he trailed Babb, Van Wormer and Richards. For him, though, putting the hammer down didn’t mean blasting around the extreme outside of the track but rather finding unexpected speed on the very bottom.

“It’s a race that, if you watch the race on video, I ain’t saying I was the first, but I want to say I was one of the first to pass that many cars (for a win) on the bottom of the racetrack probably in history at Eldora,” Pearson said, rehashing the race two decades later. “Usually we would run up against that wall at Eldora, just beat it down, whatever, all night long, but I started passing cars in that bottom — like the Dale McDowell line now, so we was way down there.

“I think the track was just a little bit wetter on the bottom. Like when they prepped the track for that night it was just wet down there but nobody went down there, and I just started creeping down, creeping down. I said, ‘Hell, this is feeling good,’ so I just kept on moving down.”

Pearson waded into a battle royale, one that had Babb, Van Wormer and Richards trading sliders. After Richards, then an 18-year-old making his second World 100 feature start, glided into second on lap 78 and briefly pulled alongside Babb, Van Wormer fought back and took the lead himself from Babb on lap 81.

Then Pearson really came on, moving into second and cranking up the pressure on Van Wormer, who was running a razor’s edge on the outside wall. Signaling Pearson from inside turn three, Langston was “giving him the old whip, like, ‘Get it going, son, gotta go,’ but EPJ didn’t push any harder than necessary.

“I think he probably won that race by being patient, saving his tires, just running that middle,” Langston said. “Our car was good, but Earl did a really good job driving that thing. He was just rolling that bottom. He was running such a good momentum line, but around the hub … and Earl’s always been good in that middle-bottom, right?

“The more he poked (under) Jeep, the harder Jeep drove. And Jeep finally stuffed it in the fence off of turn two down the back straightaway and it stopped him up and Earl just shot by him (for the lead on lap 87). Basically the more patient he was after he showed (Van Wormer) the nose, the more he felt like he probably had the car to beat.”

But Van Wormer, then a 31-year-old in his second World 100 start, put up one epic fight. The daredevil antics he displayed, lap after lap, amazed everyone, including Pearson.

“Jeep Van Wormer … oh, God,” Pearson said, shaking his head at the memory of the Pinconning, Mich., driver’s on-the-edge performance. “His sparks was in my face. I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I mean, he drove the wheels off that thing.”

“Jeep was sparking off the wall every other lap … maybe every lap,” Langston said. “I can’t believe his car held together. If it was today’s cars, the way we’re all rolled up and everything’s just a little more solid, there’s no way his car would have made it I don’t think. He was, like, going in there a couple times and just like pancaking the wall and still digging off the corner with the lead. I was like, ‘Man, this guy has got to mess up here in a minute.’ ”

Pearson felt his experience gave him an edge in the final showdown with Van Wormer.

“Nothing against Jeep, but my experience helped me,” Pearson said. “Sometimes when you get in the lead in that kind of a race and you get pressure, you’re like, ‘What am I doing? What am I doing wrong? Where’s the guy behind me?’ And then it puts a lot on you, and that’s when he started making the mistakes — getting in the wall, beating it down, this, that, and the other stuff. That helped me a lot.”

Van Wormer’s hopes effectively ended on lap 88 when his slider attempt on Pearson went bad; he jumped the cushion between turns one and two and fell to fourth. The then 32-year-old Babb moved back into second and stayed within relative striking distance of Pearson, keeping the pacesetter honest and his crew chief anxious.

“I’ve always been kind of a pacer, and I was walking from turn two to turn one and back every lap at the end of that race,” said Fitzgerald, who, with no giant video board outside of turn two in ’06, couldn’t see what was happening at the other end of the track. “I probably wore out a pair of shoes in that moment in time.”

“It was just a fun race,” Pearson said. “Yes, it was intense, and to be able to win that race was a dream come true, but just to go through that race, you know, with the guys that we was around, racing hard, and for the most part, very clean, was unbelievable.”

Fitzgerald was the team member who restrained his emotions the longest after Pearson secured the victory.

“Everybody’s all pumped up and excited when we crossed the checkered flag, and I was probably the calmest, coolest, most nervous one because I didn’t say s--- or do anything until that (green) light came on across the scales,” Fitzgerald said. “It was nerve-wracking.”

Langston didn’t hold back. He just went right into celebration mode.

“I was standing there (in turn three) with two (signal) sticks on top of a wheel and tire, and I remember after the race I was so excited that we won, I just took off on towards the front straight away to find Fitzgerald,” Langston said. “We were all just tickled to death, pumped up, high-fiving, chest-bumping.”

There was one slight buzzkill to the moment when Langston later went back to turn three.

“Some asshole stole my tire and wheel I was standing on,” Langston said. “I was scared to tell Kemp (Lamm, team owner Carlton’s son) about it until later. But he said, ‘I don’t care. We won the World.’ ”

Aftermath

Who was the first person to reach Pearson in victory lane? Memories can become a bit hazy after 20 years, but Pearson believes he knows that answer.

“It’d have to be Jason Fitzgerald,” Pearson said. “I remember he was so excited … which, me and him are like best friends. He was jumping up and down when I come across the scales. I know it was him — him and Matt. It was special.

“When I got out of the the car on the stage, it was just like ... I mean, everybody was pumped up. Of course, I’m excited, and you got Carlton Lamm up there — Big C, I mean, he told me after the race that he sat on that four-wheeler in the infield for like the last 10 laps and he never watched a lap. He said, ‘I just put my head down, and it is what it is.’ ”

Lamm, 65 at the time and a car owner since the ‘90s, relished reaching the top of the Dirt Late Model world.

“Big C, he was ecstatic,” Fitzgerald said. “I mean, I’d say that had to be the highlight of his racing career for him. He was pumped up. I never seen that man so excited — and he was excited a lot.”

“He was so tickled,” Langston added of Lamm, who died in 2018 at the age of 77. “I mean, that was the biggest race Mr. Lamm had ever won. He was so happy.”

Kemp Lamm didn’t accompany his father to the World 100; he remained in North Carolina to work at the family’s Ford dealership, so he learned of Pearson’s victory through a phone call that he’ll “never forget.”

“It was definitely the highlight of our career, just because we had been there so many times and not even made the shows so many times,” Kemp Lamm said. “And then we got where we were making it consistently, and then we got where we were running top-10s every show … and then for Earl to win it like he did on the bottom and outrun that caliber of competition, it was incredible.

“My father will tell you, it was one of the happiest days of his life to win that race. I mean, it truly was. He was still on Cloud Nine for 30 days. With us being a racing family as long as we had, it always been a big deal to just to try to make the show, and then to get to the point where we actually won it … and win it with Earl was even more special because he was like family to us.

“I will never forget, he was in conversation with (former NASCAR driver) Ken Schrader after that,” he continued. “Ken had said something to him about, ‘Man, I’d give every trophy I got in my case to get that World 100. I know you got to be proud.’ Dad said, ‘There’s no words to describe it.’ ”

Pearson was the team member who took the moment most in stride. Fitzgerald recalled Pearson’s ecstatic state lasting only a short time.

“Obviously with Earl, win or lose, he’s the same demeanor,” Fitzgerald said. “I remember grabbing him and shaking him and telling him, ‘Hey, you just won the World 100,’ and he's smiling, pumped up and stuff, but you know, 15 minutes later, he’s just Earl again. I was like, ‘Dude, how can you not be more excited?’ Like, I was excited for the next six months. That’s probably the most excited in racing I’ve ever been personally.”

Langston was summoned to the press box after the postrace ceremonies and given the responsibility of handling Pearson’s $39,000 in race winnings, which in those days was still distributed in cash.

“I think Earl was up there doing interviews and they gave me all the money,” Langston said. “It was like in a manilla envelope. Earl was like, ‘Take this back to the truck.’ I remember walking down from the stands and I’m like, ‘Damn, no security or nothing.’ I was like speed-walking back to the truck.”

Fitzgerald recalled Langston returning wide-eyed to the truck in the pit area.

“He’s like, ‘Man, you ain’t gonna let him believe this. I just walked through with all this freaking cash,’” Fitzgerald said. “I told him, ‘Well, you better lock these damn doors.’”

The party in the pit area stretched on for a few hours. No one with the team wanted the moment to end.

“There were so many people in the grandstand that come down and just was talking about Jeep and the sparks and this and that,” Pearson said. “And just so many people wanted to shake your hand, get an autograph, so I stood there a long time.”

Langston remembered “a line of people waiting at the truck to buy T-shirts for what seemed like an hour or maybe more … and we sold like every T-shirt we had, which was, I mean, we only had like one shirt (design).”

With the pits largely cleared of haulers and the influx of fans gone, Pearson decided it was finally time to head out. He had an early-morning flight home from the airport in nearby Dayton, Ohio, that he had to catch.

“I remember it was like 3 in the morning and the car was still out and I told Big C, ‘I gotta get a shower. I’m going to the airport,’ ” Pearson said. “He said, ‘Good job. No problem.’ ”

After loading up the car, the team drove out of the pit area with Pearson inside the hauler, but Fitzgerald said “we kicked his ass out of the truck” for Pearson to get his ride to the airport “and we got on the road.”

Pearson arrived at the airport with his flight boarding time still several hours away, so he took a nap.

“I remember, like, in the baggage claim area, there were some (Eldora) fans in there,” Pearson said. “Some shook my hands, talked a minute, then I went over in the corner and I laid down on the floor just using my suitcase as a pillow. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the first phone call was from Bobby Labonte.”

The NASCAR driver, of course, would buy out Lamm’s Dunn Benson Racing team at the end of the 2006 season and bring Pearson over to drive for him in ’07. Labonte would also return Pearson’s World 100-winning car to Lamm in ’07; after Pearson ran it several more times in ’06 and through Georgia-Florida Speedweeks for Labonte in ’07, a new front clip was put on the machine and it was refurbished to its World 100 appearance.

“We put an aluminum Yates engine in it, like a 358 cubic inch engine or something like that, and made it a show car,” Kemp Lamm said. “We put it in the showroom of our parts store.”

There the car stayed for over a decade — until 2018, when Kemp Lamm, heading his family’s comeback to racing that began in ’14 with Pearson and in ’18 had Bobby Pierce behind the wheel, decided to sell it.

“When we went to Arizona in 2018 with Bobby and we broke like three motors, we came home and we had to sell that thing for some cash flow just so we could replace motors that we had broke, to be honest,” Lamm said. “We sold it to somebody down in Alabama, and then it got sold to somewhere back toward the north. I’m not sure where it’s at now.”

The winning car might be gone now, but the memories from that spectacular night remain. All the team members even have one very tangible item to remind them of the victory: a World 100 globe trophy. Carlton Lamm had duplicate trophies made for Fitzgerald and Langston, and like the Lamm family and Pearson, the crewmen cherish their pieces of history.

“I keep that baby standing tall, shining in my shop,” Fitzgerald said.

And it’s the same for Langston: “I’ve got it in my basement.”