Eldora Speedway
Notes: Quick exit after brief fire ends Heckenast's World
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Frank Heckanast Jr.'s pit area at Eldora.
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 12) — A flame visible underneath the hood of Frank Heckenast Jr.’s car as he circled Eldora Speedway early in Saturday’s 56th World 100 certainly grabbed his attention.
“I went through (turns) one and two and I was trying to shut (the motor) down,” Heckenast said. “When that happens sometimes, normally you get it put out .. but it didn’t go out.”
Indeed, Heckenast’s eighth career World 100 feature start ended abruptly on lap 26 in fiery fashion. He found himself facing the wrong direction on the inside of turn three — contact from Zack Mitchell spun Heckenast’s slowing machine — with a growing inferno swamping his engine compartment.
“That's my first time on fire in a car,” the 38-year-old driver from Frankfort, Ill., said, “so I got to tell you, it was a little unexpected, you know?”
The heated situation spawned from a carburetor problem that developed soon after a lap-11 restart. He was “running sixth and then the bolt fell out and then it broke or whatever and then the carburetor started sounding like s---, so I lost some spots on the restart.”
With the malfunction pumping the intake full of full, Heckenast began to tumble backwards as his car faltered. He had fallen all the way to 16th on lap 25 when a flame appeared.
“I was on the top (of the track), so I was trying to get down (exiting turn two) without killing the whole field,” Heckenast said. “I put my hand out, got spun (from Mitchell’s glancing blow), and then I’m like, ‘All right, I’m spinning around so the wind’s gonna put this out.’ It didn’t, and I stopped and it started burning more.
“It burned the air cleaner — the cover’s gone — and then it got the hood, which is fiberglass, and it started the hood burning, so I’m like, ‘Well, now we’re really on fire.’ Then it started blowing towards my face.
“Normally (flames) kind of go down when you stop because you’re not pumping the fuel in, but that one actually caught the hood and it just kept going, started burning,” he continued. “And that’s when I was like, ‘All right, I’m getting out.’ ”
Heckenast wiggled from his cockpit unscathed and the fire was quickly extinguished.
“Eldora did great, so thanks for the safety crew,” Heckenast said. “As soon as I stopped, they were spraying on it. If I would have realized they were coming that quick I might not have had to get out so quick, but when you’re seeing that big of a flame and you’re feeling the heat, you’re ready to get out.”
Heckenast was left with plenty of residual damage to his car, including a melted hood and spark plug wires and other fire-related problems. He was robbed of what he thought was a legitimate shot to challenge his career-best World 100 finish of 10th in the second of 2021’s double events.
“It’s pretty disheartening,” said Heckenast, who has made the World 100 field in eight of his last 11 attempts since 2013. “You make the race, and, you know, you know no one ever shows their hand that early, but you know when your car’s good, and our car was good.”
Happy with a podium
Tyler Erb knows keeping his hard-charging tendencies under wraps is the key to reaching victory lane in a crown jewel event at Eldora. On that count, he felt he did a fairly solid job en route to a third-place finish in Saturday’s World 100 behind winner Nick Hoffman and runner-up Ricky Thornton Jr.
Perhaps not enough patience quite yet to win a major at the half-mile oval, but he’s getting there.
“I felt like I conserved as long as I could. which was 11 laps, the first lap I went to the top,” Erb said with a laugh while hanging out at his Best Performance Motorsports team’s well after the race’s checkered flag. “I did look (at the lap counter). The first 11 laps I ran in the bottom, like Nick was talking about, and then I was like, ‘Ah,’ and I started moving around.”
Erb certainly didn’t burn the top down, however, in his run to a result that matched his career-best in six World 100 feature appearances, achieved in 2018 in his first start in the finale. He realized that blasting the outside wasn’t going to be a winning proposition.
There was a usable high line, “but it’s hard to run,” said the 17th-starting Erb said. “I don't know, like, it’s weird because it wasn’t really a cushion. Like it was just grip, so some laps I could run a lane off of it or drive really, really hard straight to it and make speed, but never was it just like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna run the cushion,’ you know what I mean?
“And I kept watching, like, Ricky and all them guys try to do it, and it didn’t look like they were getting anywhere. They didn’t drive to the lead doing it, so I was like, obviously, it doesn’t work.”
Erb also “never got close enough to the lead to get, like, crazy.” The one moment he had an opportunity to make an aggressive move for the top spot — the lap-88 restart following race-long pacesetter Ryan Gustin’s retirement due to a driveline failure — things didn’t materialize in his favor.
“It was Nick, Ricky, me, and I was like, ‘This is my only chance,’ ” Erb said. “And all three of us shoved in (turn one) wide open and Nick just made a good corner, Ricky got ahead and I couldn't slide him, so that was that.
“I mean, third’s better than fourth, fourth’s better than 24th, So you just gotta settle at some point. Third’s all right.”
Best World finish
After placing fourth in Saturday’s World 100, Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., no longer has to answer questions about why he had never finished better than sixth in his 12 previous starts in the crown jewel event. Now it’s just, “When are you going to win the World 100?” — and he believes that day is coming.
“We’ll keep plugging away at it,” Sheppard said of the Rocket1 team that he’s been with for nine of his 13 career World 100 feature appearances. “We keep getting better. I feel like we’ve had a really good car here since we broke this XR2 out last year (for the World 100). We’re gonna start being more consistent here at this place I feel like. We just gotta stay after it, keep it up front, and we’re gonna get ours eventually.”
Sheppard, 33, was a pre-race favorite after winning a Friday semifeature and earning the most points in the preliminary programs. He had to resort to using a provisional from his points standing to gain entrance to the A-main after failing to reach a transfer spot from his sixth starting position in the first heat — he glumly spun the hated 6 inversion number on the Wheel of Misfortune — but taking the green flag from the 19th starting spot didn’t seem to dull his chances considering just three months ago he showed race-winning speed in the Dream finale before blowing a right-front tire while stalking eventual winner Bobby Pierce.
But Sheppard said Saturday’s track surface was “just a little bit different” from the Dream conditions he mastered, and in turn his car wasn’t quite as strong as it was back in June.
“We were good, but just, you know, in order to get them last few spots, I just needed to just be able to roll the corners a little bit better,” Sheppard said. “I felt like we were carrying more speed (than during the Dream), like I felt like it kind of kept a little bit dirtier grip for longer. Once the track got black there at the end I started to come back to a little bit, but I just needed to steer just a little bit better right in the center of the corner.”
Sheppard moved up to the top-10 by lap 19, but it took him until the 88th lap to crack the top-five. He climbed to fourth after Ryan Gustin retired on the lap-88 restart but was unable to pick up any more positions.
Analyzing his race in the Rocket1 trailer afterward, Sheppard wondered if he just turned too many laps around the top of the track. In fact, he noted that he battled for position inside the top-10 with eventual winner Nick Hoffman for quite a few mid-race laps, but through all of them Sheppard was running the outside while Hoffman just kept chugging along on the hub.
“I probably — I know, woulda, coulda, shoulda — been better off if I never went to the top because you get up there and you just get burning it down and trying to make speed, trying to go,” Sheppard said. “I seen whenever Hoffman passed me in the bottom, I’m like, ‘Well … I should go down there,’ because you know, you don't want to overheat your stuff.
“I passed quite a few cars in the top, so it’s not like the top was the wrong place to be. That’s what I needed to do to get up through there. But at the end of the race, I think Hoffman was able to save his tires better and steer up through there lower in the track and I had to drive the s--- out of it a little bit.
“I passed (Hoffman) at one point, and then once the top got a little bit farther up …” he added, his voice trailing off a moment. “I could run about anywhere on the track, but for just them last few spots I just needed a little bit more left.”
Odds and ends
Nick Hoffman became the first North Carolina-based winner of the World 100. He’s a native of Belleville, Ill., of course, but he’s lived in Mooresville, N.C., since his family relocated from the Midwest while he was a boy. … Another Hoffman note: at 34 years old, he’s exactly at the average age of World 100 winners. … Ricky Thornton Jr.’s runner-up finish made him the seventh driver in World 100 history to finish second in the event the year after winning it. He joins Ed Sanger (winner in ’74, runner-up in ’75), Jeff Purvis (’84-’85), Billy Moyer (’94-’95), Scott Bloomquist (’01-’02), Jimmy Owens (’07-’08) and Jonathan Davenport (’22-23). … Ryan Gustin established a World 100 record that he’d rather not possess: most laps led in the race without capturing the globe trophy. He led the first 88 laps, surpassing Ohio driver Pat Patrick in 1983 when he paced laps 1-85 before being overtaken by eventual winner Jeff Purvis. Patrick, however, still finished second in ’83 while Gustin placed 21st after his mechanical failure on the race’s lap-88 restart. … Jonathan Davenport, who slowed to draw a caution flag while running fourth on lap 88 because he felt his car “laying on the right-rear more and more” and thought he had a tire going down, settled for a seventh-place finish after pitting. It was his 14th consecutive start in the World 100 dating back to 2013 (his first appearance in the finale) and marked the 11th time over that stretch that he’s finished on the lead lap; he was one lap down in 2014 and ’16 and didn’t finish the feature in ’18. … Davenport has three victories among six top-five and eight top-10s in his last eight World 100 starts, but he’s gone winless in his last four attempts to tie Billy Moyer’s race-record six victories. The 42-year-old is still ahead of Moyer’s pace; the Hall of Famer won his sixth World 100 in his 20th feature start, in 2010, at the age of 52. … Tim McCreadie march from the 18th starting spot to a sixth-place finish in a Briggs Transport car wrapped to resemble his late father Barefoot Bob’s famed Kinney Drugs-sponsored big-block modifieds came in his 17th feature start in 20 career attempts at the World 100. In addition, dating to his World 100 victory in 2018, he’s registered five top-five and seven top-10 finishes, missing the finale’s field just once (2023) in nine attempts. … Bobby Pierce’s last World 100 weekend before turning 30 in November was his most forgettable as his nearly perfect history of starting the feature every year since his event debut in 2013 came to an end with a smoky engine meltdown during a Saturday heat race — his second motor malfunction of the weekend, which he said has him contemplating bypassing this weekend’s Knoxville Late Model Nationals to regroup. The only previous instance Pierce didn’t start the World 100 feature was in 2021 when he was disqualified from competing in the Thursday portion of the double World 100s for the late-night actions of a crew members.
