After logging thousands of highway miles this year chasing World of Outlaws Late Model Series events at tracks he had never seen, Shirley will finally have the tour come to him.

 

The Chatham, Ill., standout is anxiously anticipating this weekend’s three-race WoO LMS Midwest swing, which visits Paducah (Ky.) International Raceway on Friday (Sept. 14), I-55 Raceway in Pevely, Mo., on Saturday (Sept. 15) and La Salle (Ill.) Speedway on Sunday (Sept. 16). Shirley, who is bidding for the 2007 WoO LMS Rookie of the Year Award, has won features at both Paducah and I-55, and La Salle is only a two-hour drive from his home.

 

“It gives you a little more comfortable situation, but all these (WoO LMS) guys are still just as tough as they are everywhere else,” Shirley said of racing at tracks he’s familiar with. “Being back home and being on the tires we’re more used to running (all three events will use the UMP DIRTcar Racing Hoosier 20/40 tire rule) will hopefully let us go to a couple races without a learning curve.

 

“We’ll be able to have our guns wide open ready to fight, I guess.”

 

Shirley, 26, has proven that he knows the fast way around both Paducah and I-55. Last year he mastered Paducah’s extreme outside groove to win the three-eighths-mile track’s ‘NASCAR Night’ event in August and the MARS DIRTcar Series-sanctioned ‘USA World 50’ in September, and he captured a July special and an August MARS show at the one-third-mile I-55 Raceway.

 

The driver known as ‘Squirrel’ loves Paducah, which is co-owned by NASCAR stars Dale Earnhardt Jr., Ken Schrader and Tony Stewart and noted Midwest promoter Bob Sargent.

 

“You can really get moving up on the high side there,” Shirley said of PIR. “But when the track’s in perfect condition like it was for the MARS show (which he entered last month), you can run the high side, the bottom or right through the middle. It’s everything a driver could want in a racetrack.”

 

But it’s Schrader’s I-55 Raceway that is probably the dearest track to Shirley’s heart. The fast, high-banked oval located a half-hour south of downtown St. Louis has never been Shirley’s hometrack, but it’s the place where he’s come into his own as a dirt Late Model driver over the past five years after an injury in 1999 ended his budding championship career in flat-track motorcycle racing.

 

“I’ve had the most success at Pevely (I-55),” said Shirley. “It seems like we can usually can do no wrong there. We’ve had bad nights there too, but we’ve usually been able to roll in there and run up front.”

 

Shirley had the first noteworthy WoO LMS outing of his career at I-55, finishing third there on Sept. 17, 2005, when the tour sanctioned the track’s ‘Pepsi Nationals’ for the first time. The WoO LMS was not part of last year’s ‘Pepsi Nationals’ (Shirley finished fifth in the UMP DIRTcar Racing-sanctioned event), but the tour returns on Saturday to sanction the 25^th annual race, which will run 50 laps and pay $10,000 to win.

 

Shirley, who has made a handful of starts at the quarter-mile La Salle Speedway (which hosts Sunday night’s ‘Best Western Illinois Fall Nationals’), is hopeful that his Ed Petroff-owned equipment will be as strong as it has been in weeks this weekend. He didn’t run one of his familiar Petroff Towing/Jayco Construction No. 3s machines in last weekend’s World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio – he picked up a ride in C.J. Rayburn’s house car instead – so he could gear up for WoO LMS duty at PIR, I-55 and La Salle.

 

After all, it’s been a tough two-month stretch for Shirley, who hasn’t made a WoO LMS start at a track he knows relatively well since July 3 (Missouri’s Lebanon I-44 Speedway).

 

“You gotta know when to regroup,” said Shirley. “I don’t feel like we’ve been performing up to where we need to be lately, so we’ve been trying to rebuild to be strong through the end of the year (with the WoO LMS). We got rid of an older Rocket (car) and got a new Rocket and Rayburn, and not it seems like we’ll be able to finish out the World of Outlaws season strong.”

 

Following most of the WoO LMS schedule in 2007 has been a real education for Shirley, who has one win, three top-fives and nine top-10s in 28 tour starts and ranks ninth in the current points standings. He is chasing Tim Fuller of Watertown, N.Y., in the WoO LMS Rookie of the Year standings, which are determined using a driver’s best 30 finishes of the season. Fuller, who has already gone by the 30-race mark, leads Shirley in the rookie battle, 3,685-3,294.

 

“I don’t think anybody can realize how tough it is until you go do it,” Shirley said of traveling with the Outlaws. “You have to stay on the road for long stretches and go to all these different places.

 

“I learned real quick that you need a lot of help. When I try to look and figure out what’s wrong, I realize that it’s just that we don’t have all the help we need to be on the road with a fulltime deal (he’s had one crewman along for most events).

 

“It’s a big learning experience,” he added, “and hopefully down the road it pays off.”

 

For more information on this weekend’s races, visit www.paducahracing.com or www.paducahinternationalraceway.com; www.i55raceway.com; and www.trackenterprises or www.lasallespeedway.com.

 

Additional info on the WoO LMS is available by logging on to www.worldofoutlaws.com.