ON HIS GAME: If anyone thought World of Outlaws Late Model Series points leader Steve Francis might falter down the stretch of the 2007 season, they’d better guess again.
 
Francis hasn’t merely shown no signs of slowing down this month. He’s simply performing the best he has all year.
 
Yes, a first career WoO LMS championship is looking more and more likely for Francis, who made it through the weekend’s critical three-race Midwest swing with flying colors. He won Friday night’s 50-lap A-Main at Paducah (Ky.) International Raceway and finished fifth on both Saturday night at I-55 Raceway in Pevely, Mo., and Sunday night at La Salle (Ill.) Speedway, allowing him to add a couple points to his lead over Chub Frank.
 
Francis, 40, of Ashland, Ky., entered the weekend 52 points ahead of Frank and ended it leading by 54 markers – even with Frank also recording three top-five finishes.
 
In five WoO LMS events so far this month, Francis has two wins, a second and two fifths. He also finished second – after leading much of the distance – on Sept. 9 in the UMP DIRTcar Racing-sanctioned World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, providing further proof that he’s getting stronger with the $100,000 WoO LMS points title hanging in the balance.
 
Francis credits some time he spent experimenting last month for fueling his September rush.
 
“When we had that time off from the Outlaws (schedule) in August, we ran the Tim Logan car (the Rocket No. 11 that he campaigns in non-WoO LMS events) in a bunch of different shows close to home,” said Francis. “When we’re points racing with this thing (pointing to his own Valvoline Rocket No. 15 after winning at Paducah), it’s hard to do drastic things to your race car. But we were able to do that, try some different things, in those shows we ran with Logan because we weren’t points racing. That took all the pressure off.
 
“We tried some stuff, and we ran across two or three things that we could apply to our car and our shocks. Then Mark (Richards of Rocket Chassis) ran across a couple things talking to some engineers, and it all fit my shock program really, really well.
 
“Between what we did, what we did with Tim’s car, what Mark did, and what Brian (Daugherty of Integra Shocks) did with the shocks, it completed our program. We were able to fix all the things we needed to fix in our car.”
 
The machine that Francis has been racing exclusively this month is a car that had seen little track time since mid-May.
 
“We ran this car the very first time at Brownstown (Ind.) and I-96 (Michigan) in the spring, and then we put it in the corner and didn’t run it for a while because we didn’t run really good in those shows,” said Francis. “Then we found some stuff on Tim’s car that picked this car up and we put in a fresh Custom motor, and it’s so much better.
 
“We finally got everything together, and were’ rolling pretty good here.”
 
GRANDPA CHUB: Chub Frank will never consider a weekend without a win to be a good one, but he wasn’t disappointed with a swing in which he finished fourth twice (PIR and I-55) and third (La Salle).
 
‘Chubzilla’ also got some exciting news from the home front minutes after the completion of Saturday night’s A-Main at I-55: his wife Mary’s daughter gave birth to a baby girl, Delana Sandra Smith, just after midnight, making Frank a grandfather for the second time.
 
“It was a good weekend racing for us with three top-fives, and great weekend in general because of the new granddaughter,” said Frank, whose other granddaughter was, ironically, also born on Sept. 16.
 
NO LETDOWN: Clint Smith might have thought that luck wasn’t on his side Saturday night at I-55 Raceway when the engine in the car he was scheduled to run sustained a broken rocker arm as he warmed it up in the pit area, forcing him to pull out his backup machine.
 
But Smith’s second car – the same GRT mount that NASCAR star Jeff Gordon drove in June’s Nextel Prelude to the Dream at Eldora Speedway – didn’t miss a beat. He broke out of a two-month winless drought on the tour, capturing the ‘Pepsi Nationals’ checkered flag to reach Victory Lane for the first time since July 3 at Missouri’s Lebanon I-44 Speedway.
 
It was the Senoia, Ga., star’s fourth WoO LMS win of the season – all of which have come in the Midwest (two in Missouri, one each in Indiana and Kansas) and in races using the UMP DIRTcar Racing Hoosier 20/40 tire rule.
 
Smith isn’t the biggest fan of tire-rule events, but he can’t argue with his success in them.
 
“Fortunately we’ve been on good racetracks and it’s been beneficial for me,” he said with a smile. “It’s O.K. for me right now.”
 
TURNAROUND: Jeep VanWormer couldn’t catch a break in the weekend’s first two events. At Paducah, he had to relinquish the pole starting spot for the A-Main and start last because a leaking water pump in the fleet No. 55 he drove to a second-place heat finish forced him to run his backup MasterSbilt machine, and at I-55 he qualified through the B-Main because his car’s rear suspension was damaged when he got out of shape in the second heat and was clipped by Brian Shirley’s passing car.
 
But everything went right for the Pinconning, Mich., driver at La Salle, where he led every lap of the 40-lapper but the first to record his first-ever WoO LMS triumph.
 
VanWormer’s victory came in his backup car, which he stayed with all weekend after his Paducah heat-race problems. His performance had him thinking about running the car more often for the remainder of the season.
 
“We got a new car and started running it, but maybe we should just keep running this one,” said VanWormer. “We ran this car all last year. It’s the car we finished third with in the World 100 last year.”
 
UMP POINTS CHASERS: With UMP DIRTcar Racing Late Model national points on the line in all three WoO LMS events because UMP’s Hoosier tire rule was in effect, eight of the top-10 drivers in the UMP DIRTcar Racing national points – including the top-six – took part in at least one weekend show.
 
Defending UMP Late Model national champ Randy Korte of Highland, Ill., who entered the weekend third in the UMP standings, made the most noise. He started on the pole at Paducah and ran in the top five for more than half the distance before exploding a left-rear tire on his Gerstner No. 7K (a car he’s running in special events this fall), and at I-55 he led laps 1 and 9-22 before settling for a WoO LMS career-best third-place finish.
 
Wes Steidinger of Fairbury, Ill., and Dennis Erb Jr., who entered the weekend ranked first and second, respectively, in the UMP national points, faced off at La Salle. Erb got the upper hand with a sixth-place finish; Steidinger started from the pole position in the 40-lap A-Main, but he faded outside the top 10 before stopping on the track and then retiring to the pits on lap 23. Of course, Steidinger scrambled just to compete at La Salle after crashing hard the previous night at Kamp Motor Speedway in Boswell, Ind., which forced him to prepare an older car he had raced only a handful of times this year.
 
Other top UMP points drivers in competition included fourth-place Steve Sheppard Jr. of New Berlin, Ill. (finished 16th at La Salle after being involved in a lap-one tangle); fifth-place Jason Feger of Bloomington, Ill. (17th at La Salle after getting in the A-Main through a WoO LMS provisional); sixth-place Kevin Cole of Buckner, Ill. (19th at Paducah, where he won the 2007 track title); eighth-place Ryan Dauber of Tonica, Ill. (24th at La Salle after tangling with Sheppard on the first lap); and ninth-place Mike Schulte of Summerfield, Ill. (DNQ at I-55).
 
ROUGH ONE: Easily the wildest wreck of the 2007 WoO LMS occurred during Sunday night’s fourth heat race at La Salle. Roger Brickler of Springfield, Ill., got together with another car off turn four on a lap-two restart and had his machine launched into a wild series of cartwheeling flips on the homestretch before landing upside down past the flagstand.
 
Brickler, 47, escaped the high-flying crash without injury, but his two-week-old MasterSbilt car was a virtual write-off. He was running just his fourth race with the mount.
 
“MasterSbilt added a support bar on the rollcage last year and I’m glad they did,” said Brickler. “The roof exploded off the car while I was flipping, but the rollcage held up.”
 
While surveying his trashed car in the pit area, Brickler mentioned that he had returned on Saturday night from a three-day vacation with his wife just to run La Salle’s WoO LMS show.
 
“Yesterday morning I was on vaction in the Grand Canyon,” said Brickler. “We flew home to go racing – and I ended up taking another ‘flight’ tonight.”
 
ACTION-PACKED WEEKEND: The Midwest swing provided three consecutive nights of top-notch racing – from Francis’s charge to victory from the 11th starting spot at PIR to Smith’s dramatic I-55 triumph over Shannon Babb and Korte to VanWormer’s first career WoO LMS win at La Salle over Darrell Lanigan and a cushion-pounding Chub Frank.
 
The quality fields, intense on-track action and fan turnouts had race organizers Bob Sargent of Track Enterprises, Inc., who co-owns PIR and leased La Salle to run Sunday’s show, and Ray Marler of I-55 Raceway expressing interest in scheduling return engagements for the WoO LMS in 2008.
 
NOTABLE…
 
* Brian Birkhofer of Muscatine, Iowa, entered the Paducah and I-55 events, finishing eighth and ninth, respectively. He plans to be back racing with the WoO LMS this weekend at Bedford (Pa.) Speedway (Fri., Sept. 21) and Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway (Sat., Sept. 22) – because the two-day weekend in the Keystone State will give him a chance to attend one of his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers’ games on Sunday afternoon!
 
Birkhofer, who has a racing helmet painted to resemble those worn by the Steelers, shares Steelers season tickets with the family of Integra Shocks’ Brian Daugherty, a native of Punxsutawney, Pa.
 
* Brad Neat of Dunnville, Ky., saw his night end early at I-55 Raceway when his throttle stuck during hot laps, sending him hurtling into the turn-one wall. The front-end damage to his car was too severe to repair.
 
* Will Vaught, a 20-year-old from Crane, Mo., who has enjoyed a breakout year on the MARS DIRTcar Series, entered Saturday’s program at I-55 Raceway. He qualified through a heat race but dropped out with four laps remaining, leaving him with an 18th-place finish.
 
Vaught, who made a handful of ARCA stock-car starts in 2005 and 2006, is hoping to build up his family-owned dirt Late Model team during the off-season with an eye on a possible run at the WoO LMS Rookie of the Year Award.
 
For more information on the WoO LMS, visit www.worldofoutlaws.com.