Eldora Speedway
Lost driveline, lost World for heartbroken Gustin
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Ryan Gustin's disabled car rolls into the pits. (Zach Yost)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 12) — Ryan Gustin couldn’t hold back his disappointment. It was right there for the FloRacing cameras to capture when he limped to a stop in Eldora Speedway’s pit area after his bid to win Saturday’s 56th World 100 fell 12 laps shy with a powerless car.
As Gustin’s crew members circled his Todd Cooney Motorsports No. 19r, the 35-year-old driver from Marshalltown, Iowa, removed his helmet and fired it through his machine’s window. It crashed into the ground and bounded away — just like Gustin’s almost race-long grasp of the crown jewel event’s $100,000 top prize.
Words weren’t necessary to decipher Gustin’s emotions.
“His heart’s broken obviously,” Todd Cooney, Gustin’s 53-year-old team owner from Des Moines, Iowa, said while glumly eyeballing Gustin’s silent Dirt Late Model shortly after the completion of the 100-lap feature won by Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C.
Moments earlier Gustin’s car had been pushed through the pits to the team’s rig parked on the inside of turns one and two. Gustin climbed out and almost immediately headed into the trailer. He needed a few minutes of solitude inside before emerging in shorts and a T-shirt, but his dejection remained and he soon wandered off to the dark, muddy corridor between his trailer and Michael Norris’s hauler to be alone again with his despair.
That area between the trailers was where Gustin stopped to discuss his cruel fate. His face was drenched in sadness as he spoke in a deliberate tone.
“You don’t get these opportunities very often, so … yeah, I don’t really know what to say to be honest,” said Gustin, a former open-wheel modified standout now in his fifth straight year as a World of Outlaws Late Model Series regular and seventh year overall of full-time Dirt Late Model competition. “It stings a lot, it really does.
“I felt like I did everything right. The guys did everything right. Everybody did a hell of a job. It just wasn’t meant to be I guess.”
There’s no guarantee that Gustin, after leading the race’s first 88 circuits from the pole position he earned with sixth-heat victory, would have held off the charging Hoffman for the final 12 laps after a caution had tightened the field. After all, the 34-year-old had sliced over 9 seconds off his deficit to Gustin from laps 59-88 as he chugged along the inside of the half-mile oval to move from eighth to third, so he was clearly on the move.
But Gustin had been virtually flawless for the entire distance. Perhaps he could have found a way if, on the lap-88 restart, his car’s driveshaft hadn’t let go and dropped onto the racetrack between turns one and two, causing him to slow for a caution flag and drift into the infield awash in grief.
Gustin was never seriously threatened while racing out front; he built a straightaway edge at times over Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., who ran second for the first 73 laps. His advantage shrank later as eventual runner-up Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., and then Hoffman, chased from second place, but he still looked oh-so-smooth running right through the middle of the track’s corners.
“I mean, it was spot on,” Gustin said of his Infinity Chassis. “We were set up really good. I just wanted to try to get the jump at the start, set my own pace, just go fast enough to hold them off. But I felt so good, just going around there at a good clip, I wasn’t hurting my tires I don’t feel like, so I kind of kept going.
“Then you know, toward the end, the lapped cars were getting harder pass, it was kind of getting laned-up or whatever, but the caution came out (on lap 88). I was gonna have to hit my marks the best we could, and we got a good restart, I felt like, but I went down into (turn) one and just all hell broke loose there.”
Gustin’s driveshaft smacked against the inside of his car when it let go, caused a slight injury to the insult of losing the lead.
“It actually beat the s--- out of my leg and everything,” said Gustin, whose right leg was a bit sore afterward.
What caused the driveshaft to give out? It’s not like Gustin ever ran excessively hard or tossed his car around the extreme outside of the track, which also happened to be pretty smooth. All he could do was chalk it up as just something that can’t be explained.
“I guess it just wasn’t our time to win it, unfortunately,” Gustin said.
Making his sixth career start in the World 100 finale, Gustin had his program right where it needed to be. His effort was buoyed by the recent return to the fold of well-traveled mechanic Cody Mallory, a talented wrench-twister who left the team shortly before last year’s Dream at Eldora. He was invited to rejoin the team after Cooney sat down last month to discuss how they might go about turning around their frustrating 2026 season.
“Me and Ryan talked on a Wednesday (in August), about 10:30 at night, and, you know, we decided to bring Cody back in to try and get us straightened out,” Cooney said. “I called him at 10:45 that Wednesday night, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m getting you a flight here. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ He said, ‘I’ll be there.’
“That was it — it was a three-minute conversation and Cody was back.”
Mallory’s first race back at Gustin’s side was Aug. 28’s WoO event at Adams County Speedway in Corning, Iowa, but “he couldn’t really be hands-on (that evening) because that was the day I picked him up (at the airport) so he didn’t really have a chance to go through the car or anything,” Cooney said. “Wheatland (last weekend’s MLRA doubleheader at Missouri’s Lucas Oil Speedway) was our first real shot with him and we worked through a bunch of stuff there, and they we went to Moberly and it went real well” with a $10,000 victory in Sept. 6’s unsanctioned Weiner Nationals at Moberly (Mo.) Motor Speedway.
Gustin was happy for Mallory’s return.
“Obviously having him back helps takes a huge, huge workload off of me trying to be the crew chief and driver,” said Gustin, whose ’26 ledger shows just five victories (one in WoO action) after his previous seasons with Cooney tallied 15 victories in ’24 and seven in ’25 (including the $100,000 USA Nationals). “Now I get out of the race car and we collaborate or whatever, and I get up on top of the trailer and watch lap times and watch the races. I can focus on what I need to do.
“Obviously this weekend, it’s the World 100 and there’s tons of pressure on everybody, but yeah, it definitely takes a lot of pressure off me whenever you’ve got somebody really good that can watch the car and knows what to do. He’s obviously had a lot of success (at Eldora with multiple drivers), too.”
Cooney noted that Mallory was extremely confident in Gustin’s prospects for success at Eldora.
“He kept telling me we was going to win this thing,” Cooney said. “I was like, ‘Ah, let’s just hope for a good finish.’ ”
Mallory, 41, nearly called his shot. Gustin had victory in sight one year after registering a career-best World 100 finish of fifth.
“We’ve just had one of them years, a lot of struggles, and then everything went right tonight,” Cooney said. “From the heat race on, everything just went the way it was supposed to go. You couldn’t have dreamed it any better.
“Did we have anything for Nick? I don't know. We would’ve had a clear track, clean air on the nose. I think it would’ve been a hell of a race there because, I mean, everybody who knows Ryan knows he wasn’t pushing it. He said, ‘I feel like we still had a little bit left,’ but we couldn’t even find out. We’ll never know, will we?”
Cooney, who watched more than half the race from a suite outside turns three and four sitting alongside Hoffman’s car owner Tye Twarog, tried to console his driver and crew afterward.
“I just told him to keep his head up. He did hell of a job,” Cooney said when asked what he told Gustin. “That’s what tried telling all of them — just keep your head up. You guys done a hell of a job.
“It just sucks. I hate for these guys more than anything. Cody really wanted this bad. These guys work so damn hard and this year has just not been our year. A lot of struggles.
“So I catch a plane at 6.30 tomorrow morning. I’m going to go straight the airport when I leave here. It’s gonna be a long hour sitting in the airport, I can tell you that.”
Cooney paused. He then summed up the trying moment: “This is the one they all want to win. And this will be the one that got away.”
Gustin would agree. He’s never experienced the type of all-encompassing anguish that comes with falling short the way he did in the World 100.
“Nothing compares to that right there,” Gustin said while shaking his head. “That’s 100 percent heartbreak, for sure. It’s about as s----- a feeling as you can get.”
