Brandon Overton Wires Super Bowl of Racing at Golden Isles

In a Nutshell: No surprises to kick off the 2023 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series. Longhorn chassis were dominant and the defending champion finished second.

What They’ll Be Group Chatting About This Morning

From qualifying through nearly 75% of Thursday’s feature at Golden Isles, O’Neal and the Rocket Chassis house team did everything right. Quick time in qualifying, an uneventful heat race ending in a transfer spot and a top-five run going in the feature. Only to have it all disappear when Davenport made an uncharacteristic error and dumped him. The night definitely showed that gap between the Rockets and the Longhorns isn’t insurmountable, but Thursday will be a hard pill to swallow for the Rocket team.

Boy, was the Flo Racing/MAVTV crew pushing hard to sell the “Chase” system that the Lucas Oil series has adopted for 2023. Yes, there’s a ton of money being poured into the series this year and that’s undoubtedly a positive, but I still have yet to hear a compelling reason why it took turning the premier dirt late model series in the country into NASCAR to get said money to flow into the tour.

Though I will concede a point that James Essex made during Thursday’s broadcast that the LOLMDS Chase system, which will see the 2023 championship decided by the Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora Speedway, could well be the carrot that gets Overton, who has run outlaw schedules for as long as he’s been on the national stage, to commit to a touring series. There’s very few drivers better at Eldora than Overton after all.

It truly was remarkable just how many crate late models were out and racing down South on a Thursday evening.

Having said that, I’ve got to admit I was torn over how Golden Isles Speedway handled their race format, which had the support crate late model classes do hot lap qualifying to set half of the field, then ran B-mains to set the rest. On the one…