West Virginia Motor Speedway
Ignition crisis averted as Sheppard claims crown
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Brandon Sheppard (1) and Devin Moran (99) battle at WVMS. (Clifford Dove)
MINERAL WELLS, W.Va. (Oct. 18) — By all outward appearances, Brandon Sheppard’s drive to clinch the 2026 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series title in Sunday’s 46th annual ARP Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway couldn’t have gone more according to plan. | RaceWire
He had to stay within close proximity to his Devin Moran, his only challenger in the points standings. He did that for the entire 100-lap distance, never falling more than two spots behind Moran and, in fact, passing Moran late to finish second. And he won his first-ever Lucas Oil championship.
So steady and workmanlike, which is the hallmark of Sheppard and the Rocket Chassis house car team.
“We did what we had to do,” Sheppard said while sipping a celebratory beer at the Rocket1 trailer in the pit area. “Overall, just a testament to my team and how hard they work, how consistent we were all year long.”
But beyond the silky-smooth performance by the 33-year-old star from New Berlin, Ill., there was a particularly worrisome moment for him and his crew about a third of the way through the event.
Sometime early in the 37-lap stretch of green-flag racing that started the DTWC — Sheppard isn’t quite sure exactly when — as the race’s sixth starter ran in fourth or fifth place, his car’s engine “just started popping and missing and carrying on and I didn’t know what the heck was going on.” The members of Sheppard’s Mark Richards-led team heard the troubling sounds from their vantage points in the infield hot pit and became concerned. They thought the machine’s powerplant might be souring or, even more frustratingly, Sheppard was experiencing a recurrence of the apparent ignition problem that caused him to briefly stall while sitting fifth during a three-to-go caution period in the previous week’s Lucas Oil-sanctioned Clash on the Wabash finale at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.
As Sheppard noted, the Rocket1 gang never was able to definitively diagnose what precipitated that scary hiccup at Eldora. They just worked on every possible reason for the problem.
“The guys worked on this thing all week to try to prevent it,” Sheppard said. “They took the fuel cell apart, changed all the filters, did everything in our power to make sure that it wasn’t gonna happen.”
It didn’t resurface in the DTWC, but Sheppard was instead struck by another malady. The misfire he developed was the result of a broken crank trigger on the underside of the engine — perhaps from being hit by a rock or piece of mud — though he initially wasn’t certain of that fact.
“It’s been so long since I’ve had a crank trigger go bad that I just don’t recall it (acting) like that,” Sheppard said. “It was almost, if I would spin the tires a little bit on the straightaway, it would clear up some. So I thought, you know, Maybe the (apparent) fuel problem from last week’s showing back up.”
The race’s first caution flag, on lap 37, allowed Sheppard to take a deep breath and determine what might have gone wrong.
“Luckily we got a dual-ignition deal where I can switch it to run on the distributor instead of the crank trigger,” Sheppard said. “You can do that under green. I didn't. Luckily, the caution come out when it was popping. I was thinking about, you know, all the different scenarios or what it could be going on, and I was like, ‘All right, I need to flip this (to the backup ignition) just in case,’ and it cleared right up and never missed again the rest of the race. We got lucky there for sure.”
With a crisis averted, Sheppard settled back in. He was confident that he could roll on and close out the championship.
“I knew we were gonna be fine as long as nothing happened,” Sheppard said. “Like our car’s good, night-in and night-out, everywhere we go. It’s fine, especially in the long races. Long races is where we shine, so the 100 laps, I felt good about that part of it. I knew it was a matter of just putting myself in position to be there at the end of the race.”
And, of course, never letting Dresden, Ohio’s Moran, who started fourth, escape his sight. Sheppard entered the season finale leading the standings by 45 points over Moran, meaning a Moran victory would require Sheppard to finish at least fourth to secure the title.
“I knew if I was gonna be behind him,” Sheppard said of Moran, “I needed to be with him.”
Sheppard dutifully maintained close contact with Moran. He was only briefly separated from Moran by two positions during the race’s first half when Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., overtook him for fourth place, and for much of the feature’s second half Moran and Sheppard ran third and fourth.
“J.D. passed me back one time, and he kind of showed me a little bit of a different lane than what I was running. which helped me later in the race,” Sheppard said. “He basically showed me to not overrun the corner, that if I was gonna run the middle, not to overrun the middle. And that helped whenever we had a restart (on lap 89). Devin put me on the outside on that one (as they sat 2-3 behind leader and eventual winner Ricky Thornton Jr. for the Delaware double-file restart), and that let me sneak by him (for second) before the caution come out.
“I just had a good enough run and them guys were all, you know, in the bottom, so when Ricky got to (turn) one and slowed down on the bottom, that let me have just a little bit of clean air here where I could just roll around the outside of Devin.”
Moran, 32, said he “actually timed (the restart) up too good,” opening the door for Sheppard to get a run on him.
“I was on the bottom and I about ran over Ricky so I had to let off a little bit, and when I did I just hurt my momentum enough that I went and overcharged one and bounced the nose,” Moran said. “That just gave (Sheppard) that slight advantage he needed.
“Honestly, I felt like we had a really good shot at (winning the race) if that caution doesn’t come out with 11 to go. It took me took me some laps to get going, and right there before the caution I was all over Ricky and we were finally catching lapped traffic. I felt like I was better than him in traffic, and I think I would have won the race.
“But I didn’t,” he added. “We ended up third. I want to go back and watch and see what I could have done better, but just a bummer we didn’t get it done.”
Sheppard had visions of doubling his pleasure by clinching the championship with his record-breaking sixth DTWC victory. Even with the title in the balance, he didn’t driver conservatively in second for the final 10 circuits.
“I mean, I was thinking (about winning the race) at that point,” said Sheppard, who won the DTWC four times at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park and most recently in 2023 at Eldora. “But at the same time, the longer the race went, it seemed like the more that being out front in clean air was important. I think it was just because the track was getting super slick and it wasn’t throwing as many wet crumbs up the track. It was just throwing more dry crumbs up the track, so you really needed to be able to run a momentum line in that bottom to run the fastest line.
“When Ricky got out front he was able to do that, and then, on top of that, I knew it was gonna come down to the last lap if I was gonna get close to him. Which we did, the last couple laps we closed in on them, but it seemed like, for whatever reason, a short run, I wasn’t that good.
“Yeah, I wanted to win,” he continued. “But at the end of the day, at the same time, I knew I had the championship to worry about.”
Indeed, the $100,000 DTWC prize was attractive, but the big one staring him in the face was the $250,000 check for winning the Lucas Oil title. He wanted it to add to his record five World of Outlaws Late Model Series championships and give Richards’s Rocket1 team a 10th national crown, eight with the Outlaws and two on the Lucas Oil tour.
This one was hard-earned for Sheppard and Rocket1, who reunited in 2025 after Sheppard ended his ultra-successful 2017-22 stint with the team to spend a couple years with Riggs Motorsports and the Longhorn Chassis camp. Sheppard put together a superb performance record on this year’s Lucas Oil circuit — nine overall wins, 28 top-fives and 39 top-10s in 47 feature starts — but he had to come from behind after some Georgia-Florida Speedweeks misfortune.
“If you think back, we had two flat tires running inside the top three or four in points races at Ocala (Fla.),” Sheppard said. “And that’s the thing — we had a great Speedweeks (winning twice with Lucas Oil and once in WoO action), but we had them two flat tires in Ocala. And that would have been fine if we had had a good Golden Isles (the following week), but Golden Isles was … not good, but it was better than where we finished those two nights at Ocala with the flat tires.
“So that put us seventh (215 points behind leader Hudson O’Neal) coming out of Speedweeks. We came all the way back and built a good points lead, and then the Florence (North-South) debacle, we DNF’d at Florence (due to his involvement in a multicar crash that erased much of his points edge). So things could have went another way many a time, but we just stayed after it.”
Moran made Sheppard sweat down the stretch, closing with a $50,000 Pittsburgher victory among four straight podium finishes. He ran “as hard as we could” in DTWC but couldn’t overcome Sheppard to repeat as Lucas Oil champion, falling 55 points short. He also lost the four-race Big River Steel Bonus Program battle’s $100,000 payoff by just 10 points to Thornton, so settling for second in the two points races cost him $110,000 — a financial near-miss that certainly left him a bit disappointed.
“Yeah, without a doubt,” said Moran, whose will received $200,000 for finishing second in the overall points and $40,000 as the runner-up in the Bonus Program. “The four years I’ve been with (car owner) Roger (Sellers) we ran second (in points) three times. It’s kind of disgusting, but we just got to get better and see what we can do next year.”
Moran had hoped that other drivers would rise up and push Sheppard down in the running order of Sunday’s feature. It never happened.
“Especially when I was in second. I was just thinking, ‘Devin, just do everything right, you have a good shot, you can win this,’ ” Moran said. “And I was hoping J.D. and a couple of them guys could get by (Sheppard), but they deserve to win (the championship). They were good enough to run second and be up front. They got it done.”
Moran offered his heartfelt congratulations to Sheppard, a driver he considers a friend. The relationship between the two was evident before the start of Sunday’s program when, as Sheppard was riding his motorbike through the pit area to take a look at the track, Moran gunned the throttle of his own pit bike, caught Sheppard and playfully cut him off.
“Did you see that? That was funny, wasn’t it?” Moran said, the dejection of losing the title replaced by a smile. “Sheppy’s my buddy. I mean, honestly, that’s all the Lucas guys. We all get along really great and it’s a great group to just race with for sure. I love being around them. It’s a good time for sure.”
This Lucas Oil season just boiled down to being Sheppard’s turn to reign supreme. In his fifth season as a regular on the tour, he broke through.
“It’s really one of them deals, we knew at the end of last year that we were gonna be good this year,” said Sheppard, who finished fifth in last year’s points standings after missing the top-four chase-style playoffs. “But right off the bat this year, me and Mark were clicking really well, communicating real well. The whole team was, and it showed the whole year.”
Now Sheppard is one of four drivers to win both WoO and Lucas Oil titles, joining Richards’s son Josh, the late Scott Bloomquist and Tim McCreadie.
“That’s pretty cool,” Sheppard said of the achievement. “It means a lot to me to do something only a few other guys have done.”
