Motorsport News

DL Wilson Excited to Race ARCA East, Chase Top-5 Finish

2022 ARCA Iowa DL WIlson (Credit: Matthew Putney/ARCA Racing)

New team, new number, same DL Wilson. The 59-year-old Texan is ready to compete in the 2024 ARCA Menards Series East season with a goal of a top-five points finish.

“I think maintaining through the season,” Wilson told Frontstretch. “I look to get top five in points in the East series. That’s my goal. And have some good finishes. The East series is tough; there’s a lot of good young guns in there, some good quality teams, so it is going to be hard to get in the top five. But that’s my goal.”

Wilson intended on running the full East slate in 2023 with Fast Track Racing, but an early season injury sustained in the race at Phoenix Raceway curtailed those plans. He endured quite the rehab to fully recover from his injuries.

“It was tough,” he said. “I pride myself on being in pretty good shape, but I broke five ribs on the same side there, injured my sternum, bruised my heart and got a pretty serious concussion. So, it was a pretty massive crash. 43 g’s on that NASCAR data that they pulled out of the car.”

His racecar was destroyed, including badly bending the roll cage.

Five months later, Wilson climbed back into the racecar at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park and also participated in the ARCA event at Bristol Motor Speedway.

“There was a little bit of nerves, but it’s like anything else,” he continued. “You got to get back on the horse, and once I got out there, I made laps and I made some mistakes. But that car we had, it was our backup to our backup car, and it was not a great car, so we struggled with it at IRP. We did not do too badly at Bristol with it. Bristol is still such a physically demanding track, so that got to me a little bit.”

Enter 2024. Wilson has two racecars. His new team, Costner Weaver Motorsports, is currently building him a Gen 5 racecar with some of the parts from his Phoenix car. The other racecar is a Ryan Hopkins one which ran well at Bristol and inside the top five at Five Flags Speedway before. Team owner Caleb Costner has his fleet of racecars, too, and the team keeps building.

“We’re excited to be with Caleb,” Wilson said. “We have a friendship that we’ve had a little bit, and we have law enforcement backgrounds. We’ll run all the East races and maybe some main series races, but we’ll see how that all works out. We got a new chassis, it is a Ryan Hopkins in a purpose-built ARCA short track car, so we are excited about it. We’re building a…

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