CONCORD, NC – Sept. 24, 2007 – 
 
OH, WHAT A NIGHT: Saturday was a good day for the Richards family.
 
Teenage dirt Late Model sensation Josh Richards won Saturday night’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series ‘Pittsburgh 50’ at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway, giving him a victory in a race he’s been attending for most of his life.
 
And Richards’s triumph came behind the wheel of the Rocket Chassis house car fielded by his father Mark, who claimed an unprecedented sixth ‘Pittsburgher’ title as a car owner.
 
What’s more, the top-10 finishers in the A-Main were all behind the wheel of Rocket Chassis cars – and the Victory Lane celebration was a true family affair, with Josh’s mother and sister and Mark’s Rocket Chassis partner, dirt Late Model veteran Steve Baker (who failed to qualify at his hometrack), among those on hand for the post-race fun.
 
“This place has always been pretty special to us,” said Josh, who lives in Shinnston, W.Va., just over an hour-and-a-half drive from the PPMS half-mile. “I can remember coming here as a kid and watching all these guys I’m racing with now run this race. When Davey (Johnson) won it for us, I had a crew uniform on and was in the Victory Lane picture.
 
“It’s always been cool to come to the ‘Pittsburgher,’ and now to get my name up on that (winner’s) list is a thrill.”
 
Richards, 19, joined Tim Hitt (1996 and 1998), Davey Johnson (2000), Rick Aukland (2002) and Bart Hartman (2004) as drivers who have piloted a Rocket house car to victory in the 19-year history of the ‘Pittsburgher’ spectacular.
 
“Two tracks I’ve always wanted to win at were Hagerstown (Md.) and here,” said Richards, who in 2004 ran the first dirt Late Model feature of his career at Hagerstown and the third at PPMS. “To win at both of them this year (he captured Hagerstown’s WoO LMS show on July 21) is just awesome.”
 
Richards’s ‘Pittsburgher’ triumph gave him four WoO LMS wins this season, tied for second-most with Shannon Babb of Moweaqua, Ill., and Clint Smith of Senoia, Ga. He’s very proud of that stat.
 
“My goal coming into this year was to get four Outlaw wins,” said Richards, who has led more laps on this year’s tour (301) than any other driver. “I knew that would be a high standard, but I knew we were capable of doing it.
 
“I feel like we should’ve won six or seven, but to get four Outlaw wins in our third year (as a fulltime traveler), it’s real fun.”
 
PRE-RACE POINTER: WoO LMS Rookie of the Year contender Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., headed east early and stopped at the Rocket Chassis shop to finish up a new car.
 
Before heading to PPMS with Josh Richards and Darrell Lanigan for an open practice session on Thursday night, Shirley got a quick tutorial on running the track. Mark Richards pulled out a tape of Josh’s first-ever race at the oval, an early-2004 event in which Josh went from ninth to the lead before blowing a tire.
 
“I showed Shirley the tape so he’d know how to run around here,” said Mark Richards. “It’s a different place. You just run it like a big circle.”
 
Shirley, 26, proved he’s a quick learner in Saturday night’s ‘Pittsburgher,’ driving forward from the eighth starting spot to finish second in his first-ever start at PPMS. It was a finish that gave the event a true young-guns flavor – Richards and Shirley, after all, are the only drivers under 30 ranked among the top-15 in the WoO LMS points standings.
 
The weekend had to the potential to be a great one for Shirley, who started his trip to Pennsylvania on Friday night at Bedford Speedway by being the first driver to break the one-lap track record in time trials. (Only Steve Francis went on to better Shirley’s mark.) But later, as Shirley was racing down the backstretch with a commanding lead on the final lap of his heat, a busted distributor triggered a brief-but-spectacular fire under the hood of his Ed Petroff-owned No. 3s.
 
Shirley escaped the flame-up without injury, which he attributed to wearing fireproof gloves.
 
“I’m glad I started wearing gloves a couple years ago,” said Shirley, who also noted that the fire fortunately didn’t cause any major damage to his car or engine.
 
HIGH MARKS: After winning Friday night’s inaugural WoO LMS event at Bedford Speedway, Chub Frank was impressed with the improvements that have been made to the half-mile fairgrounds oval in recent years.
 
“This place used to be kind of dangerous,” said Frank. “You couldn’t see very well because it was dark, and the (retaining) walls were low. The last time I was here, (Todd) Andrews was out in the trees in the parking lot after hopping over the wall.
 
“Now this place has great (Musco) lights, and it was racy. It got a little rubber at the end, but it was good. I hope we come back here next year.”
 
That’s a definite possibility. Bedford co-promoter J.R. Keifer reported that the event – the biggest dirt Late Model show in Bedford’s long history – drew the track’s largest crowd of the season. With the card going up against western Pennsylvania’s vaunted Friday-night high-school football schedule, Keifer couldn’t have been more pleased with the turnout.
 
NO SHUFFLING: The battle for the 2007 WoO LMS championship remained status-quo after Saturday night’s ‘Pittsburgher 50’ because the event offered only show-up points (75 points to all entered drivers).
 
WoO LMS officials made the announcement because an open practice session was held at PPMS on Thursday night, violating the tour’s rule that prohibits open or private practices at a track within one week of a one-day show.
 
“The rule was put into our sanctioning agreements in an effort to help keep costs down for our traveling teams,” said WoO LMS director Tim Christman. “In the past, teams had voiced concerns about the added costs of traveling to tracks early – and in some cases renting them – for practice sessions.”
 
TOUGH OUTING: Since there was no points-chasing pressure on Saturday night, Clint Smith, who sits third in the WoO LMS standings, decided to try some experimental setups on his GRT No. 44.
 
But after finishing a dismal 11th in the A-Main, Smith noted that he “just went in the wrong direction” with his attempts to uncover some speed.
 
“We tried stuff that was supposed to work, and it didn’t,” said Smith, who scored a much more satisfying fourth-place finish on Friday night at Bedford. “We were just terrible. We had no side-bite or traction the whole night. It was just hang on, hang on. I came in and changed a left-rear tire and it helped a little bit, but it still wasn’t right.”
 
OBSCURED: Rick Eckert experienced a scare during Saturday-night heat-race action at PPMS.
 
Running fifth on a lap-two restart, Eckert clearly had trouble getting his car up to speed. He lost several positions by the time he reached turn one.
 
What happened?
 
“I got so covered with mud when we restarted, I couldn’t see,” said Eckert, who had a thick spray of mud thrown into his face by the car ahead of him. “They had that mud around the inside of the racetrack, and I think it was Davey (Johnson) who got his left side in it on the restart and it just flew back at me and covered me up.
 
“My tear-offs were so slippery from the mud I couldn’t get ‘em off, so I eased into the corner slow because I couldn’t see where I was going. I was back about eighth until I finally got a tear-off off and could see again.
 
“I never had that happen before,” asserted Eckert, who missed transferring his mud-caked car by one spot and went on to win a B-Main and finish 12th in the feature.
 
BATTLING THE BIG BOYS: Friday night’s ‘Bedford 50’ was another strong WoO LMS performance for Jeremy Miller of Gettysburg, Pa., who recorded a tour career-best finish of second.
 
The run came on the heels of Miller’s fourth-place finish in the July 28 WoO LMS event at Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio, where he led until being overtaken by Chub Frank with only six laps remaining.
 
“Just to be up there battling with those (WoO LMS) guys, that’s all I ask for,” said the 36-year-old Miller, who drives outgoing car owner Charles Buckler’s Rocket No. 24. “It’s very tough racing these guys. People who just come in to run against them for a few shows and leave, like myself – it’s like, I’m running better than I honestly can expect.
 
“We’re slowly getting better,” he continued. “We just gotta keep working on it. We got on some new Genesis shocks (one week ago), and they turned our program around. You still gotta make the right decisions, but I’m happy. Maybe we got something to work with.”


NOTABLE…
 
* WoO LMS Rookie of the Year leader Tim Fuller of Watertown, N.Y., continued a solid stretch of WoO LMS action on Friday night at Bedford, finishing third in his first-ever start at the oval.
 
The run gave Fuller two thirds, a fourth and a sixth in his last four WoO LMS starts – results that made it difficult for him to skip Saturday night’s ‘Pittsburgher’ in favor of an Advance Auto Parts Super DIRTcar Series big-block Modified triple 50s event at Rolling Wheels Raceway in Elbridge, N.Y. But Fuller is committed to running the big-block Mod tour this season, and three top-five finishes at Rolling Wheels kept him in the points lead with only four races left on the 2007 schedule.
 
* Three weeks after his wildly popular upset victory in the Sept. 2 WoO LMS event at Tri-City Speedway in Franklin, Pa., Dan Stone of Thompson, Pa., was back racing with the tour at Bedford and PPMS. He failed to qualify at Bedford, but he got in the ‘Pittsburgher’ thanks to a WoO LMS provisional and finished 21st.
 
Stone, who plans to enter the final four WoO LMS events of the 2007 season, said the reaction to his Tri-City triumph among the locals back in Northeast Pennsylvania was amazing. He was featured in local-television and daily newspaper stories, and on Sept. 7 he visited his old hometrack, Penn-Can Speedway in Susquehanna, Pa., to sign autographs and display his Tri-City winning car and the unique gas-pump trophy that he received.
 
Oh, Stone also brought his steel-block Late Model along to Penn-Can – and won the night’s feature.
 
* Muscatine, Iowa’s Brian Birkhofer shifted from racing mode to tailgating Pittsburgh Steelers fan as soon as he loaded up his No. 15b after finishing seventh in the ‘Pittsburgher.’
 
As Birkhofer drove his hauler out of the PPMS pit area – wearing the Elvis mask that he had donned earlier to draw some laughter during the pre-race drivers’ meeting – Sunday’s Steelers game against the San Francisco 49ers was on his mind. Birky, who shares Steelers season tickets with the family of Integra Shocks rep Brian Daugherty, was headed for his first Steelers game of the season.
 
* Ronnie DeHaven Jr. of Winchester, Va., who can be counted on to enter WoO LMS events when the tour stops near his home, entered the weekend’s doubleheader with high hopes after debuting a new GRT car the previous week in the Hub-City 150 at Hagerstown Speedway.
 
But DeHaven ended up taking home a machine that had a mutilated front end from a hard run-in with PPMS’s inside guardrail. DeHaven wasn’t injured in the B-Main incident, but his car’s impact damaged the turn-three fence, causing a short delay as track crews worked on the area.
 
* One of the most impressive comebacks of the weekend was authored by 2007 Selinsgrove (Pa.) Speedway champion Jeff Rine of Danville, Pa., who qualified for the A-Main despite missing time trials due to a broken birdcage in his car. He charged from the rear of his heat race to finish fifth (one spot short of transferring), then placed second in a B-Main and 15th in the feature.
 
* The WoO LMS is off until Wed., Oct. 10, when it stops at The Dirt Track @ Lowe’s Motor Speedway for the Jani-King Southern Showdown.
 
The event will be the final tuneup for the highly-anticipated Nov. 1-3 ‘Outlaws World Finals’ at The Dirt Track, an inaugural blockbuster that will bring together the World of Outlaws Late Models and Sprint Cars on the same program.
 
For more information on the WoO LMS, visit www.worldofoutlaws.com.