Eldora Speedway

Notes: Tire-wear studies key for Eldora knowledge

October 14, 2026, 2:56 pm

By Kevin Kovac

DirtonDirt senior writer

Dale McDowell (17m) finished fourth at Eldora. (heathlawsonphotos.com)

ROSSBURG, Ohio (Oct. 10) — Dale McDowell climbed out of his car after finishing fourth in Saturday’s 50-lap Clash on the Wabash finale at Eldora Speedway and immediately directed his focus to the left-rear tire.

The 60-year-old veteran’s analysis of the Hoosier shoe was intense. He licked a finger, wiped it on a spot in the tread pattern and bent over to bring his eyes close to the rubber. He was checking the wear, the grooves, the sipes, trying to decipher if the tire might have caused him to fall back after leading the race’s first 25 laps off the pole position.

“What people don’t realize, out of this whole organization, there’s only four little contact patches touching the racetrack,” McDowell said, emphasizing the importance of a car’s tires. “So you have to figure it out.”

McDowell directed a crew member from his team, which is fielded by his younger brother Shane McDowell, to visit the postrace tech area and look at the tires on the cars of the top-three finishers. He needed to know if the drivers who beat him — Ricky Thornton Jr., Devin Moran and Josh Rice — had prepped their tires differently.

“You don’t know unless you look,” McDowell said. “And like we talk about, 90 percent of the time, (the tires will) be one way, but then here, it may be different. So you always want to look at your competitors and see if your apples-to-apples.

“We’re just trying to diagnose if it’s the tire, or the way we’re preparing a tire, grooving a tire, siping a tire, versus if we need to make some changes on the car. If it’s not the tires, we got to make a little bit of a change on the car to get it a little bit more limber. I’m just rigid out there so I have to run a longer, sweeping run” through the corners.

As a driver known for typically starting deep in Eldora’s crown jewel finales and calmly working his way forward into contention during the second half of the 100-lap races, McDowell found himself in the strange spot of leading Saturday’s field to the green flag after winning the first heat. With just 50 laps to contest for this Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event’s $50,000 top prize, McDowell couldn’t run his usual Eldora race.

“In the 100-lappers, they hurt their tires and I can usually save mine,” McDowell said of long-distance prowess at Eldora. “But the reason that I feel like I can save mine is because I can’t go fast midway through the race.”

Which proved to be McDowell’s undoing in the Clash on the Wabash. The middle stages of the Dream and World 100, where he seems to struggle, were the stretch run on Saturday, and during that period the Chickamauga, Ga., racer lost the lead to Thornton and later ceded spots to Moran and Rice.

“Once (Thornton) slid me, and I seen he could still be aggressive and leave the corner better than I could, I knew I was just hanging on,” McDowell said. “When I was out in clean air I was actually OK, but when I’d get to lapped traffic, I would absolutely die. And I know they slow down as well, but we just absolutely lost a bunch of speed there.”

McDowell was pleased with the performance of his Team Zero Race Car in the wake of the frame repairs his brother made to it — the car sustained significant damage last month in the heat-race accident that ended his streak of 18 consecutive World 100 feature starts — but it wasn’t good enough to win over a shorter distance.

“I raced (the 50-lapper) a little different, I raced it a little bit more aggressive,” McDowell said. “But if I got to race it more aggressive, we may have to get a little less aggressive on the tire or the setup. Something’s got to compensate.”

Engine-swapping expertise

When Tyler Erb returned to his pit stall Saturday with smoke wafting from underneath his Best Performance Motorsports car’s hood following a fourth-place finish in Heat 2, he instinctively knew what he needed to next.

Not resort to his backup car. He had to immediately jump into an engine swap.

“Qualifying, I was like, ‘Man, I should be faster,’ and I wasn’t,” Erb said later after finishing eighth in the Clash on the Wabash finale. “And then, after the heat, obviously something was messing up. Like the engine’s not completely junked; it was just smoking, and I could tell something’s messing up, so then I nose-in (to the trailer after failing to transfer by one spot in the heat) and I was like, ‘Ah, we should probably change it.’

“Obviously, I wasn’t gonna run the feature or the B-main like that, and there’s no reason to pull out a back up and start last in that B-main — it’s impossible (to finish top-two from the rear). So I was like, ‘Well, maybe there’s enough time to change it.’ ”

There’s always enough time for Erb to swap out motors, especially when he’s at Eldora. He’s become, after all, the king of changing powerplants in the middle of major events at the half-mile oval.

Three years ago, on Saturday of the 2023 World 100 weekend, Erb led a last-minute engine replacement effort for his Georgia buddy Steven Roberts, whose discovered a motor problem barely an hour before the scheduled start of heat racing. Erb removed the engine from his own backup car and had it buttoned inside Roberts’s machine in time for the prelim.

And then during the 2024 Dream weekend, after Erb’s pal Brandon Overton found an engine malfunction after qualifying for a 50-lap preliminary feature through a heat, Erb, who wasn’t racing that night, stepped up again to orchestrate a hasty motor change that allowed Overton to retain his starting position in the headliner.

“I feel like I’m the ringleader of the engine-swap program,” Erb said with a laugh.

Saturday’s change was for his own benefit. With some assistance from his friends in the pits, Erb had a fresh engine in his No. 1 and fired it up just in time to make the call for the first B-main, which he won. Then he advanced from the 19th starting spot to place eighth in the 50-lapper.

“That’s not what you want, but I guess it worked out,” Erb said. “I got to thank Ethan Dodson, Brandon’s guys, Garrett Smith’s guys, (Mike) Marlar’s crew. You know, sometimes there’s too many people, but you just have to have a lot of faith in everybody. I try to double-check what I can check. We only had two lines that were loose before we rolled to staging and one other thing.

“But we changed the oil lines and everything, the filters. The only thing we didn’t change was the oil pump.”

Erb didn’t think he set a personal engine-change record time, but it was all done in less than 45 minutes.

“I feel like when we changed Brandon’s (in ’24), that might have went a little smoother,” Erb said. “This one went smooth, but it just started slow. When we first started everybody was kind of like dragging their feet, and then when the mods rolled out (for four heats) we had just set the second motor in it. So in those mod heats we connected everything, put the radiator in it, changed the oil … and ran another 60 laps.

“That was cool. Not many people can do that.”

Erb, 29 of New Waverly, Texas, even mused that perhaps his engine-changing services might worth monetizing in the Dirt Late Model pit area.

“That’s what I told Brandon (Overton),” Erb said. “I said, ‘Dang, how much do you think they’d pay us to change engine? Like, how much you think I’m worth?’ He’s like, ’S---, I don’t know.’ ”

Erb concluded with a quip: “I’m a better crew chief than I am race car driver, for sure.”

Rice's recovery

Josh Rice’s 23rd-to-third run in Saturday’s 50-lap Clash on the Wabash was remarkable enough. It becomes even more notable when one considers the condition of his JRR Motorsports Rocket Chassis a short time before the 10-minute horn was blown to line up the feature.

The 28-year-old Lucas Oil Series rookie from Crittenden, Ky., smacked the outside wall running second late in the second B-main, inflicting significant damage to his No. 11. He knew he was still in the feature with a points provisional, but he thought the team might have to get the backup car out of the trailer.

“I don’t know if Bobby (Pierce) lost something or Bobby ran over whatever I ran over,” Rice said, referring to Pierce, the B-main’s leader, simultaneously slowing with a flat right-rear tire. “I seen (the debris), and about the time I seen it, I was in the wall. It blew the right-front out. It hurt it pretty good, but, I mean, obviously it ain’t hurt too bad.”

Rice and his crew managed to patch the battered machine back together in hasty fashion.

“We changed everything on the right-front,” Rice said. “The right-front shock was broke. Right-rear deck pieces. And I don’t know what was wrong, but when we sat it down it was toed out 3 inches. Right before we rolled out (for the feature) James (Rice’s older brother) and a few of them got it close.”

Rice said he “changed a lot of (setup) stuff there during the fiasco of trying to get everything fixed, just a few adjustments for what I thought I needed to do,” and the tweaks seemed to work.

“I kind of got like a test run at it a few times (before the green flag) and I could tell like it was pretty good,” Rice said. “I’m like, ‘Damn this thing might be all right.’ As soon as we fired off there, there was a lot of them that were in the way … I could tell immediately I was going to be really good.”

Rice made a superb charge through the field, reaching his ultimate finishing position of third with a lap-41 pass of Chickamauga, Ga.’s Dale McDowell. His advance stalled there.

“I got to (eventual runner-up) Devin (Moran) there and I kind of picked up a vibration,” Rice said. “All the tires looked all right, but I picked up that little bit of vibration and could tell that like I’d kind of leveled out and that's where I was. And then we had that caution there (on lap 47) and I could tell I didn’t have no launch. I knew I was going to be screwed on that restart. I probably luckily finished third there at the end. I was ready for it to be over before that caution come out.”

Rice’s podium result was his 14th top-five finish of his solid first season as a national touring regular. He’s won three times on the Lucas Oil Series — a Show-Me 100 prelim, a North-South 100 semifeature and, of course, his unforgettable home-track victory in the North-South headliner at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky. — is locked into a seventh-place points finish and will be crowned the circuit’s 2026 Rookie of the Year during this weekend’s season-ending Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells.