Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Lesson learned, Rocket1 is back on top
Brandon Sheppard was standing alongside his Rocket1 race car in street clothes, sipping a beer and accepting congratulations from fans and fellow racers. His car owner, Mark Richards, was smiling and enjoying conversations nearby. So were crew members Danny White, Austin Hargrove and Joel Rogers.
This postrace scene Sunday at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells was just like old times for New Berlin, Ill.’s Sheppard and the Rocket Chassis house car gang. They were celebrating yet another national title, a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship that was the first for Sheppard, the second for Rocket1 and their fifth national crown together.
Everything seemed, and felt, so familiar as the driver-team pairing that realized so much success from 2017-22 — most notably four World of Outlaws Late Model Series titles — was back on top of the Dirt Late Model world in the second year of their ballyhooed reunification after Sheppard clinched the crown with a runner-up finish in the 100-lap feature.
“It’s great to have him back and win a championship with him,” Richards said of the 33-year-old Sheppard.
But while the vibes were certainly the same as the Sheppard/Rocket1 heyday, the overall atmosphere around the team’s pit stall after this accomplishment was noticeably different from B-Shepp’s first WoO title with Richards and Co. in 2017. When Sheppard won that initial title nearly a decade ago at the age of 24, there wasn’t a bunch of little kids connected to the team running around the race car afterward like there was on Sunday evening.
“I only had one (kid) back then. Now I’ve got three,” Sheppard said as he glanced at the whirlwind of activity that included two of his children, Addison, 8, and Baylor, 4. “Danny (White) has got two. Mark has grandkids.”
Richards, who celebrated his 66th birthday on Monday, acknowledged how the passage of time has brought an expansion to the extended Rocket1 family.
“My grandkids were here and their friends were with them,” Richards said, noting that WVMS’s location, just 90 or so miles from Rocket’s shop in Shinnston, W.Va., allowed his daughter, Morgan, to bring her children to the track. “Brandon had his kids here, Danny did too. Hell, victory lane looked like a Fairbury (Ill.) victory lane with the Sheppards.”
Considering Sheppard began appearing behind the wheel of the iconic Rocket1 machine in 2012, Richards has watched him grow from a fresh-faced, 19-year-old upstart to a husband, father and a true Dirt Late Model superstar.
Richards said he can “remember before he had any kids.” The car owner also can recall when he learned that Sheppard was going to become a father for the first time.
“Quick story,” Richards said. “Before he had Jase, his first (son in 2014), Josh (Richards) didn’t want to run the Dirt Track (World Championship at Ohio’s Portsmouth Raceway Park in October 2013) and I called Brandon and I said, ‘You want to run the Dirt Track?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I want to run the Dirt Track.’
“So the guys that were with me then wasn’t these (current crew) guys, and (crewman) Matt (Barnes) said, ‘His (then) girlfriend is going to have a baby,’ and Brandon never said a word to me. So he was starting seventh that night and we was on the front straightaway and I walked up to him and I said to him, ‘Hey, you get another 5 percent (share of the payoff) tonight if you win because you’re going to need it to buy diapers.’ He was in the car and he looked up at me and said, ‘OK.’ Then got up there and drove the s--- out of it and won the race.”
Sheppard laughed when he heard Richards recount that moment. “That was many moons ago,” Sheppard said, shaking his head.
Richards and Sheppard have shared many life milestones. That’s the result of being associated with each other for so long. They’re a pair whose history together formally began when they met in 2011, but Richards had his eye on the teenage Sheppard even earlier.
“I seen him at Lincoln one night,” Richards said, recalling a 2010 WoO event at the Illinois track. “That was first time I actually knew there was a Brandon Sheppard. We had raced with his dad, Stevie, for a few years, and he’s in a 5 car, but there was another 5 car there running behind Josh when he was about fifth and I asked (longtime racing benefactor Ed) Petroff, ‘Who the hell's driving that other 5 car? He said, ‘Brandon.’ I said, ‘Who the hell’s Brandon?’ He said, ‘That’s Steve's boy. I said, ‘He’s better than Steve.’ He ran right beside Josh and never touched us.”
Richards brought Sheppard on for stints with Rocket1 from 2012-14. It was the 2017-22 stretch, when Sheppard took over as the team’s primary driver with Josh Richards’s decision to leave the seat, that saw him fully blossom. B-Shepp and Rocket1 became one of the division’s best combinations, as evidenced by Sheppard’s 100-plus feature victories, four WoO championships and over $3.5 million in earnings during the six-year span.
But Sheppard revealed late in the 2022 season that he would leave the cozy confines of the Rocket team to drive Longhorn Chassis in ’23 for the newly-formed Sheppard-Riggs Racing. It was seismic news, the end of an astounding era. And as with any close relationship that disintegrates, there were hurt feelings left in the departing person’s wake.
Two years later, though, Sheppard came back home to Rocket1. He had some success driving Longhorns — nine victories in 2023 including the Silver Dollar Nationals and DTWC and his record fifth WoO title in ’24 — but he couldn’t approach his heights with Rocket1 nor find the comfort level he had enjoyed. He wanted to return to the place that had molded him into an elite racer — and fortunately, Richards agreed to reunite for the ’25 season.
Now, after climbing back to the sport’s mountaintop with a national championship in Year 2 of his return, Sheppard is thankful that he was able to go home again. At the same time, he doesn’t regret his two years away from Rocket1, a period during which he experienced personal growth.
“It’s crazy to think about, but, you know, for me, it was probably the best thing that I did,” Sheppard said. “Looking back at the time, and then now, everybody might think it was just me making bad choices. But was it a bad choice to do what I did a couple years ago and leave? I don’t look at it that way now, because I learned a lot when I was gone. I learned a lot of lessons, hard-earned lessons.
“And I think Mark knew that. Just after we talked the first time about me coming back, I think he knew right then that I learned a lesson and it was all gonna be better. I’m just glad Mark was willing to take me back at that point. After that, it’s like, ‘Wow, I’m not gonna mess this up again.’ ”
Richards’s five decades spent in the racing game have made him realize that holding grudges isn’t worthwhile. Time moves on. Let bygones be bygones.
“The big thing I see is life changes, right?” Richards said. “Sometimes it changes differently for some people.”
Sheppard’s return didn’t produce instant magic; he won just five times in 2025 (three on the Lucas Oil tour) and finished fifth in the series points standings. But Richards called it “a year of getting things back the way they were.”
“We went to Florida (for Speedweeks) when we first got him back and we didn’t have things where they needed to be for him,” Richards said. “And I don’t know that his confidence was where it needed to be. It just took some time to build it back. Last year he was a little bit uncertain, and you could tell he was uncertain.
“We started getting there last year about halfway through the season. Shepp was getting his confidence back. And this year when we went to Volusia (Speedway Park for Speedweeks), he was back to being Brandon. We came out of Speedweeks, I don’t know, seventh in (Lucas Oil) points, but we won (three) races, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about the points. We’ll win this championship. This thing’s good enough. I know I can make it up.’ ”
With Sheppard surrounded by the same crew that was with Rocket1 when he left, he felt it was just a matter of time before they would be operating once again at full song. This season was proof as he won 15 races with the team, including eight on the Lucas Oil Series and the WoO circuit’s Prairie Dirt Classic a Fairbury Speedway, and became the fourth driver in history to capture both WoO and Lucas Oil titles, joining Josh Richards, the late Scott Bloomquist and Tim McCreadie. His consistency was impeccable with 28 top-five and 39 top-10 finishes in 47 Lucas Oil features, carrying him to the $250,000 crown by 55 points over Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio.
“Part of what makes us as good as we are is that my confidence is 100 percent in Mark, and he returns the same confidence to me the same way,” Sheppard said. “So at the end of the day, win, lose, suck, fast, whatever the situation is that night, we don’t get mad at each other. That don’t do no good. We don’t play the blame game and point fingers at each other. We talk about what we need to do to be better, whether it’s me driving, whether it’s me running the wrong line, whether it’s set up stuff … no matter what it is, we all talk about it so we make better choices the next time.
“We just get along really well. That’s what makes for a good team, is everybody clicking, everybody getting along. As much as a car being consistent, having a consistent crew, and the same crew year-in and year-out, is huge. We know each other so well. I’m not saying we can finish each other’s sentences or anything like that, but, like, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, when we’re on the racetrack, and whether it’s Dan signaling me or Mark telling me something, or me talking to Mark when I come off the track, we’ve got an idea of what we’re trying to do.
“Like when I communicate a certain thing to Mark, Mark doesn’t take it any way except for what it is. He knows what I’m getting at when I tell some feedback or whatever. And same goes for the crew.”
Sheppard just feels so comfortable with Rocket1. He truly is home.
“That’s the thing about this sport, is there’s so many downs to go with the ups, it makes it very difficult, it makes it very frustrating at times,” Sheppard said. “To say that we didn’t get frustrated this year at all would be a damn lie, because I can tell you, everybody’s been frustrated at points.
“But that’s also another thing that makes us good, is that we just don’t quit, don’t give up. We don’t pout. We don’t throw a fit when we run bad. We talk about it, we figure it out, we go again next week.
“My team here, we’ve been together all these years, and, you know, it’s still the same as it’s always been. Everybody works their butts off, knows their jobs and does a great job doing what they’re doing. It lets me concentrate on driving, let’s Mark concentrate on making the right setup calls, and we just plug away all year.
“I mean, obviously, we’re happy we won (the title), but as good as our year was, if we wouldn’t have won, we weren't gonna hang our heads,” he added. “We were just gonna get ready for next year and try to do it again.”
Steadiness. Work ethic. Race smarts. The Rocket1 team as a whole possesses it all, and Sheppard is the perfect driver to be at the center of the mix.
“This is what I’ll say about Brandon — Brandon has turned into the new Scott Bloomquist,” Richards said, likening Sheppard’s style to the late Hall of Famer. “You know, he’s patient and he’s there at the end. Just like tonight (in the DTWC finale) … he’s just riding, riding, riding, riding. He got a chance to get to second (late in the distance) and he went.
“And he’s racing for a championship, and patience wins championships. He used to not be that guy. He used to be up there knocking the deck out. You seen him win a lot of races, back in the Outlaw days, and we’d have the deck tore out, spoiler knocked off, and now he’s turned into … I say he’s come back as Scott Bloomquist. He doesn’t have to be hanging on the edge, you know, to win.”
Richards, of course, loves having Sheppard back and relished sharing another title together. Hargrove quipped that he thinks Richards “will be 90 and still winning championships,” but Richards doesn’t take any success for granted.
“I don’t know how many more I can win,” said Richards, whose team has won six national titles in the last 10 years and 10 overall (Josh Richards captured four WoO crowns and Hudson O’Neal won the ’23 Lucas Oil championship). “Nobody does, you know? You know, it’s like Kyle Busch said, ‘You never know when you’re gonna win your last one because anything can happen.’ ”
One thing is certain — Sheppard hopes to bring Richards more glory. After being welcomed back by Richards, he never wants to leave again.
“His loyalty is one thing that I learned while I was gone that you can’t look past,” Sheppard said. “You gotta be loyal in this sport. You gotta be loyal to the people that are loyal to you. I wasn’t at one point, to Mark, but, like I said, that was a lesson that I learned. That was one of the many lessons that I learned while I was gone.
“I think Mark knew that, and when I come back, it was a matter of, he knew, and I knew, my family, everybody knew, that this time it was for real and had to work.”
Sheppard paused. He considered the years ahead and made a pronouncement of his intentions to stick with Richards for a long, long time.
“You know,” Sheppard said with a smile, “I’ll push that old f-----around in a wheelchair if I have to at the racetrack because I’m not going anywhere now for sure.”
