Eldora Speedway
Lucas Oil's two-driver title chase goes to WVMS
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
West Virginia Motor Speedway hosts the Lucas Oil finale. (Zach Yost)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Oct. 10) — Brandon Sheppard is hanging tough. Devin Moran is on the charge making a last-ditch bid.
And Hudson O’Neal? After a crushing DNF in Saturday’s 50-lap UNOH Clash on the Wabash finale, his Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series title hopes effectively spiraled down the drain like the rain that hit Eldora Speedway shortly following the event’s checkered flag.
The doubleheader at the famed half-mile oval turned the national tour’s championship battle into a two-driver face-off for Oct. 16-17’s season-ending Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells. Both the standings-leading Sheppard and Moran — separated by a modest 45 points — are ready for the ultimate showdown with their usual calm, collected outlooks.
“It’s crazy it’s come down to this the first year that they don’t have the playoffs, right?” Moran said, referring to the Lucas Oil circuit’s return to a traditional season-long championship format this season after a four-driver, chase-style reset to close the previous three years. “It’s coming down to the end so we’ll just give it all we got.”
Said Sheppard: “We want to win the championship more than anything in the world at this point, but, at the end of the day, we gotta take what we get. If we get it, we get it. We don’t, we don’t. That’s racing.”
Sheppard, 33, of New Berlin, Ill., entered Eldora’s weekend leading the standings by 40 points over Martinsville, Ind.’s O’Neal and 65 points over Dresden, Ohio’s Moran. He leaves with a slightly larger edge after recording finishes of second in Friday’s 40-lap preliminary feature and sixth in Saturday’s $50,000-to-win headliner, but he now has to deal with a sizzling Moran as the 32-year-old continued his late-season surge.
Hot off a $50,000 victory in Oct. 3’s Pittsburgher finale at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway in Imperial and driving the same Double Down Motorsports Longhorn Chassis he debuted in the event, Moran twice landed on the Eldora podium. He was third in Friday’s prelim and rallied from the eighth row to second in Saturday’s finale behind winner Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., who swept the twinbill but isn’t in the title chase.
Moran looked like he was on his game in his pursuit of a second consecutive Lucas Oil Series crown but first under the traditional points format. He made strong advances forward both nights — though, of course, he would have preferred to avoid his midpack starting spots.
“My car was really, really good, but it’s the same story as all year,” Moran said. “I’ve only won half the amount of heat races as Shepp, and we passed twice as many cars in the feature. We went from 11th to third last night and 15th to second tonight, so we had a really good race car. We just got to figure out how to start up front.”
Moran wished that Saturday’s big-money finale “would have been a longer race” with his machine picking up speed throughout. He didn’t reach second place until lap 41 when he slid by polesitter Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga. Moran never drew close enough to Thornton to threaten the leader in lapped traffic and wasn’t able to seriously challenge the victor in clear track following a lap-47 restart, but he also ceded critical time when he failed in his first attempt to pass Sheppard for fourth.
Eighth on a lap-24 restart, Moran immediately rocketed to fifth. He eyed Sheppard’s Rocket1 vehicle ahead of him and sought to quickly gain another spot with an aggressive slider through turns one and two on lap 28. Moran lost traction and drifted high off the second corner, however, slapping the outside wall as Sheppard crossed him to retain the position.
Moran held on to fifth, but he had to gather himself and it took him until lap 34 to overtake Sheppard. He would love to have those six circuits back.
“Honestly, that really hurt me,” Moran said. “That’s what really hurt the pace of my race, and it hurt my (right-rear) deck a little bit. It definitely kind of messed things up a little bit, but that’s just the way it goes.”
Moran rallied well, following his pass of Sheppard with slick moves to take third from Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., on lap 37 and second from McDowell four circuits later. He knew every car he drove by could slice his points deficit to Sheppard.
“I really wasn’t worried about anything other than just going as hard as I could and try to pass the next car in front of me,” Moran said. “I kind of knew what was going on, but at the same time, I was just like laser-focused on trying to get by the next person in front of me. Then lapped traffic started messing with things a little bit — some of the lapped cars were trying to race with us for some apparent reason.
“I feel like you always got to be hungry when you’re a competitor, so yeah, I was going really hard. But when you have a car like we’ve had the last couple weeks you can drive harder and make things work out.”
Sheppard couldn’t keep pace with Moran. His car was just “a little too tight” to duplicate his Friday run when he settled for second after losing the lead to Thornton in late-race lapped traffic.
But even after he “bobbled a little bit on the last lap” rounding turns three and four and lost fifth place to Kyle Bronson of Brandon, Fla., Sheppard was counting his lucky stars. During the lap-47 caution period, as he was sitting in sixth place, his car’s engine started sputtering, shutting off momentarily.
What was the problem? Sheppard thought he might have inexplicably run out of gas, or perhaps had an ignition issue. Whatever the case, as his powerless car limped to a stop on the inside of turn one during the caution, he envisioned absorbing a title-turning dropout.
A push truck pulled up behind Sheppard, but, just as it appeared, Sheppard was able to “get the car started back up” and he drove off on his own. The reason for the hiccup remained a mystery to him afterward, but he was relieved that it didn’t cost him dearly.
“We easily could have DNF’d,” Sheppard said.
That was the cruel fate suffered by the 26-year-old O’Neal, the 2023 Lucas Oil Series champion who was running 10th when his SSI Motorsports car’s engine went sour on lap 11 almost immediately after he bounced through a hole. The resulting 26th-place finish dropped him to third in the Lucas Oil Series standings, 140 points behind Sheppard — in short, mathematically eliminated from title contention at the DTWC.
“Something in the motor,” O’Neal said when asked about his untimely demise. “We’re not 100 percent sure. It wouldn’t idle up. It never really shut off and I never really lost oil pressure, so probably like a crank or a cam or something, it broke and was locking up.
“It sucks. I felt like, you know, we were gonna be OK. We were passing some cars (he started 14th) and it felt like we were probably going to have a similar run that we did last night (a fifth-place finish), just drive up through there.
“But it’s in the past now. It was probably was the end of our even trying to be second (in the points race), but we had a good year,” he added. “Just kind of got behind a little bit there in the summer and it just kind of led to the point of us being in this position. If we could have had our ducks in a row a little bit better through some of those months we wouldn’t have been in this position.”
So it’s Sheppard vs. Moran for the $250,000 Lucas Oil championship pot of gold at WVMS, a 3/8-mile oval that both drivers have tackled this season. Sheppard entered June 12-13’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series doubleheader at the track and tallied finishes of fourth and 13th (he led laps in both features) while Moran was the $25,000 winner Sept. 6 at the track’s Hillbilly Hundred.
“I feel pretty good about it,” Sheppard said. “I mean, the only way to guarantee a (championship) win next week, the way I see it, if we have a 45-point lead, is we got to run top-three in the feature.
“It’d mean the world (to win the title),” continued the driver who is looking to add a Lucas Oil crown to his record five WoO championships with Mark Richards Racing. “Whether it happens this year or not, who knows, but it’s gonna happen someday I feel like. My team’s plenty good enough, and our cars are really good. Me and Mark are clicking really well. The whole team is, like we always have.”
Moran knows he needs to be faster than he was last month at WVMS. He has no room for error in the 100-lap, $100,000-to-win DTWC.
“We won (the Hillbilly), but I feel like we got a lot of work to do to get better,” Moran said. “I feel like we’ve gotten better since we raced it last time so we’ll just put our notebook together and come up with some good ideas and kind of play out scenarios that might happen throughout the night and what changes we might make and go from there.”
Moran will have a singular focus.
“Gotta win. Gotta win,” he repeated for emphasis. “That’s the goal going into next weekend. No holds barred. Gotta win. So we just have to have a really good prelim night and figure our car out, and if we can do that, start ourselves up front on Saturday, you never know what might happen.”
The final-night championship pressure Moran experienced in last year’s DTWC at Eldora certainly can’t hurt Moran, but this year is an entirely new situation.
“You got to live in the now and the present,” Moran said. “You can’t live in the past. Yeah, you got to take mental notes, but I don’t think it really helps or hinders you (going through a previous title battle). It’s a full different deal so we’re just working on this year.”
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