Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Racing less not yet slowing down Dohm
Zack Dohm realizes that his run from the 14th starting spot to a fourth-place finish in Oct. 18’s ARP Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells was sort of an underdog story.
He’s not a full-time driver — and, considering he hasn’t reached 20 starts in a season in four years, he’s not an especially busy regional racer either — so going toe-to-toe with national stars in a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event is pretty impressive stuff.
But the 37-year-old from Cross Lanes, W.Va., also doesn’t think a performance like he authored in his home state’s 100-lap crown jewel should be viewed as an amazing miracle, which is why, after the DTWC, he reminded everyone that he’s been around a while and knows what he’s doing on the racetrack.
“People are like, ‘Man, you just passed (Jonathan) Davenport!’” said Dohm, who did indeed overtake the future Hall of Famer from Blairsville, Ga., for fourth place on a lap-89 restart. “I’m like, ‘I’ve been racing for 20 years, man. I can pass people.’”
Dohm is a veteran now, an experienced Dirt Late Model hand with a smooth, steady approach that has earned him respect across the entirety of the division’s pit areas. Perhaps some observers didn’t expect to see his name mixed into a DTWC top-five that included four national touring stars — $100,000 winner Ricky Thornton Jr., runner-up Brandon Sheppard, third-place Devin Moran and fifth-place Davenport — but you better believe those big guns weren’t surprised at all by Dohm’s presence among them.
Despite cutting back his schedule substantially in recent years, Dohm’s reputation in the sport continues to precede him. He doesn’t have any national touring wins, but he’s captured plenty of regional glory and he always seems to run well in the high-level shows he chooses to enter. His resume in four of the division’s most prestigious races bears out that fact: at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, he’s started the Dream finale five times (finishing as high as eighth in 2021) and the World 100 on four occasions (top finish of sixth in ’17); he’s made the Sunoco North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., eight times with a best finish of fifth (’19, ’25) among five top-10 results; and he’s made the DTWC seven times, including finishes of fifth (’18) and sixth (’17, ’20) at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park.
The problem for Dohm is, well, his situation in life. He has top-notch equipment (Longhorn Chassis, Vic Hill engines) fielded by his father Tim Dohm, a veteran driver himself, but he’s simply not positioned to go at racing full-bore. He’s never had that opportunity, in fact, but these days his other responsibilities — working at his family’s Dohm Cycles, being the father of two young children — dig into his racing activity more than ever.
“I haven’t got to race a whole lot this year, or the last few years,” Dohm said. “It’s probably how it’s going to be, unfortunately.”
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Dohm was averaging more than 30 starts per season. He had two of his most prolific campaigns during that period, winning nine features in 2020 and eight in ’21. But since competing in nearly three dozen races in ’22, Dohm’s appearances have dipped into the teens each of the last four years. The DTWC marked just his 13th A-main start of ’26, with two more events remaining on his schedule: Saturday’s $50,000-to-win Halloween Bash at Portsmouth and the Dec. 3-5 Gateway Dirt Nationals at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo.
Family time has contributed to Dohm’s dip in racing, with his son, Will, 8, involved in youth sports and his daughter, Lilah, who turns 4 in less than a month, already participating in gymnastics. Dohm said in the near future he will also likely get his son a mini-wedge car and start taking him to local tracks to begin his own career.
What’s more, his younger brother and crew chief, Nick, doesn’t have as much free time to devote to preparing a car for Zack as he did several years ago.
“Nick’s more busy now,” Dohm said. “Like, he’s older. He’s got a house, he’s got a house payment, so he’s got to work (also at Dohm Cycles). He can’t just skip more work and keep working on my race cars.”
Dohm said that these days “my 65-year-old dad does like 80 percent of the work on these (cars) to get us to the track,” which points to the elder Dohm’s unceasing work ethic as he pushes to keep his son active while also still overseeing his business.
“I really wanna make sure to thank my dad,” Dohm said. “I wouldn’t be s— without him. Thankfully, he’s a 65-year-old man that works like a 30-year-old. Like, he don’t sit around. He loves to just work his ass off and sweat, and he keeps it going for us.”
Nevertheless, Dohm acknowledged that his father isn’t superhuman. There aren’t enough hours to properly prepare Zack’s equipment for more than a modest number of races, especially with Nick making a handful of starts in his own car this season and Tim sometimes wanting to turn some laps to quench his racing thirst.
“Like us racing two nights one weekend and then racing two nights the next weekend, I don’t know if we can even do that anymore,” Dohm said. “It just takes so much … the tires and the shocks and the springs and the maintenance. If you want to have a fast car, you don’t just race it and then not do anything to it.”
Dohm understands that running barely more than a dozen times a season isn’t conducive to a driver performing at an optimum level, especially when he’s entering only special events. He doesn’t feel like he’s slipping, though.
“I’ve watched my dad, and, like, other people be good and start racing less, and eventually you just fall behind,” Dohm said. “I figured it would happen to me already and I’m just thankful it hasn’t.”
The 2026 season has actually been quite productive for Dohm, who has three victories among eight top-five and 11 top-10 finishes in his 13 starts. He didn’t win a single race in ’25 in 13 starts, so he’s bounced back nicely with a $12,000 triumph in July 4’s Freedom Revolution race at 201 Speedway in Sitka, Ky., a $5,000 Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series score on July 25 at Skyline Raceway in Stewart, Ohio, and a $6,000 triumph in Sept. 5’s first Hillbilly Hundred semifeature at WVMS.
“We’ve had pretty good results only running about a dozen times,” said Dohm, who mused that in a perfect world he would find a ride to “drive someone else’s stuff about 25 times a year.” “We ran third at Florence one night (in a North-South 100 preliminary), and I think we would have been good in that big race but they had that Talladega (multi-car) wreck that we were in. And then we ran second at the Hillbilly, fourth here (in the DTWC). I’m tickled with it.”
More than half of Dohm’s feature starts this season — seven in all — have come at WVMS, the track that promoter Mike Hurley has rebuilt from its former sprawling, 5/8-mile size into a compact third-mile oval. He’s become comfortable with the new layout, as evidenced by the strength he displayed in Sept. 6’s Hillbilly Hundred and the DTWC.
Dohm’s stirring rally in the Hillbilly finale — a tangle forced him to the rear of the field but he charged back to finish second behind Moran — provided some insight that he drew upon in the DTWC. He struggled early in the DTWC headliner as he fell back to 19th during the race’s first half, but he was confident he could still move through the field.
“In the Hillbilly I started in the back and I got to sixth, and then I had to go back to the tail and I got back to second, so I knew once the track gets kind of cleaned up a little bit and not so dusty, I would be able to run that middle,” Dohm said. “And I figured most of these (touring series) guys don’t really know about it. It seemed like for the most part they’re either in the infield or on the wall, so I made a good bit of time through that middle.
“I kept trying that middle. I was getting passed on the bottom and the top, but I didn’t give up on it. A couple of them restarts, I think I’d get, like, three in one and two, and two in three and four … I was making a bunch of moves on the restarts, just right through the middle. And then it stopped blowing so much dust, and I was able to, like, move around a little bit more.
“It was awesome,” he added. “What a run.”
Dohm’s reaction to his career-best DTWC finish — and his best crown-jewel result — was to hail Hurley’s ownership of WVMS. He feels fortunate to have a track just 75 minutes from his home hosting major races and, with its reconfiguration, offering him a legitimate shot at pulling off a monumental upset.
“I’m glad Mike Hurley got this track and has two big races here,” Dohm said. “Hopefully the Lucas guys liked it. I know they were on the fence before coming here and everything, but like after the Hillbilly, and I went to the tail and passed all them cars, I thought, Man, they’ll love it. You can move around.
“You know, I wouldn’t have really been in the game at Eldora (where the DTWC was contested from 2023-25), or the big track here. I mean, I can win a heat race at Eldora, maybe, and start up front, but I’m probably not gonna win (the 100-lappers). But here, somebody with a dually and a trailer and a standard-bore motor can run fourth in a race like this, and maybe win if you have your s— together, you know what I mean?
“Hopefully (the DTWC) stays here a long time and they keep having big races and maybe somebody like me can win one.”
