Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: From down and out to new heights
Cody Overton was down. He was also, as far as he was concerned, out. His run as a full-time Dirt Late Model driver was over.
After opening the 2026 season with a nightmarish Georgia-Florida Speedweeks that immediately put his attempt at fielding his own racing program in the red, Overton was at wit’s end. By mid-March, the 28-year-old driver from Evans, Ga., was ready to raise a white flag of surrender on his dreams.
“The race I ran second to Brandon at Modoc, that was pretty much it,” Overton said, recalling March 20’s Southern All Star-sanctioned Ed Basey Memorial at the South Carolina track won by his older brother. “I said there is no way I can keep doing this — and I even ran second. People were like, ‘Man, you’re doing good now.’ I’m like, ‘No, this ain’t done nothing.’ ”
The financials of operating his own team after his car owner of the previous two years, Dave Steine of Baldwin, Wis., had largely pulled back his involvement proved too daunting for Overton. He began Speedweeks with engine problems during January’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series-sanctioned Sunshine Nationals at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., and despite a February stretch of four podium finishes in five starts, an avalanche of mechanical trouble buried him in a hole he couldn’t escape.
Chasing the WoO tour for a third straight season as he had planned was already out of the question. His post-Speedweeks assessment told him running regionally wasn’t possible either.
“I lost three motors (during Speedweeks), and then parts were kind of getting down” Overton said. “I didn’t have much left. Everything just kept going, going, going …
“You think you can do it, and then once you do it, you realize you can’t,” he said of his bid as owner-operator. “It’s tough. It’s just entirely too hard just to keep doing all of it. You want to, but it’s just not really possible in this day. You kind of gotta have all the help you can get.”
Overton had spent the 2024-25 campaigns gaining on-the-road experience on the WoO circuit with Steine’s Tri-Star Transmission team and showed significant progress, going from zero top-five and seven top-10 finishes en route to a 13th-place points finish in ’24 to placing eighth in the standings with six top-fives and 20 top-10s in ’25. The struggle-filled start to ’26, however, hit him so hard that he no longer saw a future in driving a race car as an occupation.
“I kind of was just thinking, I’m just going to get me a normal job,” Overton said. “Like, I’m kind of done with it. I did what I wanted. I mean, I ran Outlaws. It’s just too hard to just go out and keep trying to hustle to do it.
“I had kind of pretty much gave up. I really just felt like, you know, I ain’t gonna go any further in racing. Like, this is probably it. I mean, I didn’t really do anything spectacular or special, so I was like, ain’t nobody really gonna call or do anything, so I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
But six months after his darkest moments, Overton finds himself in a position he could never have envisioned. He’s landed with an ambitious, well-heeled car owner in James Trantina III of St. Joseph, Minn., and he’s breaking out in a big way as evidenced by his three-race weekend sweep — worth a combined $37,522 — of the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series doubleheader at Swainsboro (Ga.) Raceway and Sunday’s Southern Thunder-sanctioned Jack Starrette Memorial at Modoc.
Overton has a hard time grasping how his fortunes have so dramatically swung in a positive direction.
“I thought that was it. Like, it was fun (racing for a living), but it was done,” Overton said. “But it can all change in a matter of minutes.”
Overton can pinpoint exactly when his season, and his racing career, turned around. He was in the midst of settling into his new reality, competing occasionally in the Southeast with his Excel Chassis Crate Late Model, the only machine left in his possession after liquidating the combination of his own equipment and Steine’s that he used to start the season.
“I went to Southern Raceway (in Milton, Fla., on May 6) and raced my Crate car and won like a $3,000 or something (feature),” Overton said. “I was just like, ‘Heck yeah, this is fun.’ I could race like that and go work on people’s cars during the week just to make a little money till I figure out what I was gonna do, like get a job or something.
“And then Scott Ward called me,” he continued, referring to the veteran driver from Watertown, S.D., whom Overton knows well. “He was like, ‘You wanna fly up here and race my car?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess. I mean, I ain’t got nothing else better to do.’ ”
With Ward sidelined after undergoing shoulder surgery, Overton headed to South Dakota June 5-7 to pilot Ward’s car in Repairable Vehicles.com Tri-State Series events at Aberdeen’s Brown County Speedway and Huron’s Dakota State Fair Speedway and a Structural Buildings WISSOTA Challenge Series show at Casino Speedway, Ward’s hometown track. Overton finished eighth and third in the Tri-State races and won Casino’s feature, giving him a morale boost — and, unknowingly, opening a door to a bright new opportunity.
“We won that race and everybody was just kind of was hyping me up, like, ‘Man, you need to try to find something,’ ” Overton said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, there ain’t nobody with a (full-time) ride.’
“Well, James (Trantina) was actually there at that race. Afterward we were going to eat or something and he called me on his way home and said, ‘Dude, what are you doing up here?’ And I’m like, ‘Ain’t got no ride. I don’t know what else I’m gonna do. I’m just playing around, just racing.’ And he was like, ‘What do you mean you don’t have no ride?’ And I said, ‘We got rid of all that stuff. I ain’t got anything.’ ”
That prompted Trantina to ask Overton if he wanted to race. Overton responded in the affirmative, and Trantina matter-of-factly told him, “Well, let’s put something together and you can come up here and race my racetracks.’”
A successful 40-year-old businessman whose holdings include the expansive Collins Brothers Towing, Trantina owns three dirt tracks in Minnesota — Sauk Rapids’s Granite City Motor Park, Brainerd’s North Central Speedway and Fergus Falls’s I-94 EMR Speedway — and fields the Triple B Motorsports team that runs the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series with driver Dan Ebert of Lake Shore, Minn. Overton was familiar with Trantina’s background and was casually acquainted with him, but hearing from him and receiving even a modest ride offer from him was shocking.
“I knew him, like, just from going up north and doing some (racing) stuff with (racer and former I-94 owner) Don (Shaw),” Overton said. “I met him here and there and we talked, but we were never like close enough where I could say, ‘Hey, I need a car.’ Nothing like that. It was just always like we’d ask, ‘How you doing?’ in the pits.
“And then I saw him in Florida this year. When I was having all my bad luck, he literally come down out of blue, he just popped up in my trailer and was like, ‘Hey man, what are you doing? Do you need any help? Like, man, I feel bad for you.’ He gave me some money down there, and he was just like, ‘Man, I know it’s not a lot, but just keep your head up, you’ll be all right.’
“It was just, like, out of the blue. Like, he didn’t have to do it. It was just him kind of being the guy is. He’s just a good dude and wanted to help as much as he could.”
Overton didn’t talk to Trantina again until answering that phone call from him after the WISSOTA event at Casino. He soon learned how quickly Trantina can make things happen.
“We talked and he’s like, ‘Well, just come up here and drive my car for some races and then we’ll just try to put something together,’ ” Overton said. “Then, I don't know, two days later, he said, ‘Let’s just buy some cars. I got a rig you can use, you got some help.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got a couple of my people,’ so I kind of rounded up my (sponsors) really quick and then, man, everything he said he was gonna do and more, he’s done. He just made it happen at the snap of a finger. It was just like, boom, boom, boom, and we were back doing it again.
“It literally surprised me how fast it happened because I was just like, man, there, ain’t no way this guy wants to start another team. Like, he don't really know me from nothing, he had a lot of stuff going, so there ain’t no way. He might just want to help for like one weekend and like maybe just see where it goes. I didn’t think starting a whole other team was like in his bingo cards, but damn if he didn’t.”
On June 16, the rig Trantina promised Overton arrived at Overton’s shop in Swainsboro, Ga.; he uses a garage provided to him by veteran racer Ben Faircloth. Overton filled the trailer with his equipment then headed out to pick up two Longhorn Chassis that Trantina purchased from Lucas Oil Series rookie Dillon McCowan’s team and couple Clements engines. With crewmen Ty Giles and Chapman Mohr along, the continued on to Trantina’s shop in Minnesota, assembled the cars and Overton made his debut in his new deal in June 22’s WoO event at Ogilvie (Minn.) Raceway, where he was running fifth when a battery malfunction knocked him out.
“I’m telling you, it was fast,” Overton said of the effort’s creation. “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Man, you have surprised me.’ I mean, he definitely is a go-getter, and he’s good at what he does and he can multitask way better than I ever could.”
Just weeks later Overton was a winner for Trantina, capturing three Schaeffer’s Southern Nationals features in a row July 16-19 at Modoc, Cochran (Ga.) Motor Speedway and Swainsboro for $22,648 in purses. But there was also a major scare for Overton’s fledgling association with Trantina when the team owner suffered serious injuries in an ATV accident on July 19 while working a racing program at his Granite City track.
“Right as I was going out for the feature (at Swainsboro) we heard he got hurt and I’m like, ‘Oh, God,’ ” Overton said. “I had heard it was bad and no one really knew. People were texting everybody, and like my crew guys ran to me and told me like, ‘Hey, James ain’t doing good,’ so like the whole time I’m racing I’m like, ‘Dang, I just got this ride and something’s going to happen.’
“But he definitely recovered faster than probably most would, and he's doing great. I mean, just walking around like nothing never happened. Shoot, I think like two weeks later we were at Cedar Lake (Speedway in New Richmond, Wis.) and he just popped up there. We were like, ‘Dude, you are crazy.’ He was still pretty damaged then and he said, ‘I’m living, so I’m coming.’ ”
Overton is awestruck by Trantina’s energy and positivity. According to Overton, it’s Trantina’s ability to push the right buttons that’s resulted in the success Overton is now enjoying on the track.
“It blows my mind — he just can do anything,” Overton said. “There ain’t nothing that guy can’t do, and isn’t involved in. Every day, I’m like, ‘Dang, man, how do you keep track of everything?’
“I think James just does a really good job keeping everybody pumped up. It’s not like he just texts me and just involves me. Like, he involves Ty, Chapman. He talks to every one of us and just tells us, like, ‘Keep going, you boys have got it.’ He just makes it really good, makes it easy for everybody when he’s on your side and pumping you up every day.
“That’s the biggest thing because I don’t feel like I’ve changed anything from what I’ve been doing. Maybe I have, maybe not. I feel like I just do the same old thing, but it just makes me feel good he's 100 percent behind me. I’m not saying my other car owners weren’t like that; I’ve never had a bad car owner. It’s just... I think he just eases my mind. He’s just done a really good job taking care of us and talking to us and just making us feel like we’re something, we’re a part of something.
“I’m super blessed for him,” he added, “because if it wasn’t for him I’d probably be working at Walmart or McDonald’s or something.”
Trantina’s calm demeanor also amazes Overton. He noted that Trantina’s cool nature led to Overton’s $10,000 victory driving Ward’s car in Sept. 19’s WISSOTA 100 at Trantina’s I-94 oval.
“What’s funny is I was at the 100 and I was gonna leave to come home to run that Modoc race,” Overton said, noting that the Starrette Memorial was originally scheduled for Sept. 19. “I started off good the whole weekend and then it just started kind of going downhill and I was just getting frustrated. I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m going home.’ And then James, he was like, ‘Just stay. You’re fine. Don’t worry about that race down there. Who cares? There’s gonna be more.’
“So I stayed and hung out with him, and it was good seeing him and all his family. It was just fun to be around him a lot more. And then I ended up winning, and as soon as I get to the scales and tech, they’re like, ‘Dude, you won’t believe it.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ They’re like, ‘They canceled Modoc. They’re gonna run it next Sunday.’
“And James was like, ‘See? I told you.’ ”
With his future suddenly looking much brighter, Overton is hopeful for a long relationship with Trantina. Might that include tackling a national tour in 2027? Overton would certainly welcome the opportunity, but he has no expectations of Trantina making that type of commitment. He’ll be more than satisfied to continue on the trajectory Trantina has put him on since the beginning of the summer.
“I mean, I talk to James, and I feel confident enough he’s gonna allow me to keep doing what I’m doing as long as everything’s going good and we’re not just blowing money and doing dumb things,” Overton said. “I hope we just keep doing what we’re doing, just kind of doing whatever and having fun doing it. That’s his big thing. He said, ‘If you don’t enjoy it, it’s not worth doing it. You’re gonna have fun doing it and I’m gonna have fun doing it. When you start not liking it, that’s when I’m not gonna like it.’”
Overton’s pairing with Trantina is helped by an army of sponsors and supporters who have stuck with him since his early-season disappointment. He rattles off a long list of names who have his back: Allen Murray, Jon and Jay Kicklighter, Doug and Cathy Varnadore, Cameron Tribble, Mike Stewart, Chad Tuten, Chris Newsome, Troy and Cindy Dixon, Franklin Futrelle, Michael Smith, Dustin Copeland, Ernie and Chris Bennett, Wendell Chavous, Shane Sprinkle (Cade Dillard's car owner), Brad and Lisa Cowan and Scott Ward.
“At the beginning of the year it didn’t work, and I told them all, ‘I’m sorry. Like, I tried,’ ” Overton said. “Not one of them left me. They all were just like, ‘Let’s do it again.’ ”
It’s a whole new world for Overton, who, as he approaches 30, has a fresh outlook on his racing endeavors.
“I don’t even think about (the future) anymore, honestly, because I know what it’s like to have it all and I know what it’s like to just lose it all a matter of a week,” Overton said. “I mean, it is what it’s gonna be. I’m just fortunate to have this opportunity now and I’m going to have fun with it.”
