Contact: Kevin Kovac
World of Outlaws Late Model Series PR Director
kkovac@dirtcar.com | 704-254-7929

World of Outlaws Late Model Series News & Notes: Richards & Lanigan Separate Themselves; ‘Cat Daddy’ On The Upswing

CONCORD, NC - Sept. 8, 2010 -

DYNAMIC DUO: And then there were two.

A three-driver battle for the 2010 World of Outlaws Late Model Series championship appears to have become a mano a mano showdown between Josh Richards and Darrell Lanigan, who separated themselves from Tim McCreadie after a pair of holiday-week events.

Richards, 22, and Lanigan, 40, shared victory laurels – Richards captured the 100-lap ‘Battle At Eastern Door’ on Sept. 1 at Mohawk International Raceway in Akwesasne, N.Y., and Lanigan won the 50-lap ‘Oil Region Labor Day Classic’ on Sept. 5 at Tri-City Speedway in Franklin, Pa. – and ended the Northeast swing in a virtual dead-heat for the national tour’s $100,000 title. With just four points races remaining on the schedule, Richards leads Lanigan by a scant two-point margin.

The 36-year-old McCreadie, meanwhile, suffered a crushing DNF on Sunday night at Tri-City. He finished 22nd after retiring on lap 24 due to damage his car sustained in an early-race tangle, leaving him 86 points out of the lead – a deficit that he can only erase if both Richards and Lanigan experience epic bouts with bad luck during the stretch drive.

McCreadie entered Tri-City’s action with his hopes of repeating his 2006 WoO LMS championship flickering but still alive, trailing Richards by 48 points and Lanigan by 40 markers after finishing second in Mohawk’s 100-lapper. But he had nowhere to go on lap two of the A-Main when Robbie Blair and Ron Davies tangled between turns three and four while battling for second; T-Mac slid into the incident and limped to the pit area with a mangled front bumper on his car. He returned but couldn’t get up to speed due to the problematic bumper, a piece of which fell off and cut his right-front tire on lap 24 – five circuits after he was lapped – and forced him to retire.

Richards was also involved in the Blair/Davies accident, but he snuck through the scene without stopping and his car sustained only some left-side cosmetic damage. The near-miss was one of three key moments in the week’s two A-Mains for Richards, who also narrowly avoided a devastating crash during Mohawk’s 100 and pulled off a final-lap pass of Shane Clanton for third at Tri-City to keep himself atop the WoO LMS points standings.

The close call at Mohawk – he nearly slid into the turn-three wall when he took evasive action to avoid Clint Smith’s car as a caution flag flew on lap 60 – certainly caused Richards’s title aspirations to flash before his eyes. He had, after all, entered the 100 without the points lead for the first time in 25 races, so a night-ending wreck would have put his championship chase on life-support.

“Luck was definitely on our side,” Richards said after going on to bag a $20,000 triumph at Mohawk that was his long-awaited first-ever in a 100-lap event. “When the caution came out and Clint Smith went to pull off the racetrack, I was about three inches from destroying the car. I swerved around him, turned sideways and just barely missed the (wall) opening into (turn) three.

“I really thought we were done right there. I mean, if I was a little bit further into the corner we would’ve needed a new car.”

Alas, Richards survived the scare and shortly thereafter ended his slight slump with a milestone extra-distance victory that, ironically, came in the same state where he won his first career WoO LMS A-Main (on Aug. 15, 2005, at Lebanon Valley Speedway). He was presented $20,000 in cash from Mohawk co-owners John Lazore and Don Thompson and regained the points lead as well. A few days later at Tri-City he avoided falling into a tie for the top spot with Lanigan when he picked up two critical points with his dramatic final-turn pass of Clanton.

Lanigan shook his head when he was asked after winning at Tri-City about Richards’s last-lap move to preserve the points lead, but he accepted it as just another twist in what promises to be a thrilling struggle for the championship.

“It’s gonna go down to the end – that’s the bottom line,” said Lanigan, who won the title in 2008. “Josh is running good and we’re definitely running good, so we’ll see what we got.”

RIGHT DIRECTION: A miserable 2010 season has grown a bit brighter in recent weeks for Clint Smith, who has shown signs of snapping his frustrating two-year victory drought on the WoO LMS.

Smith, 45, has gone winless in 110 consecutive tour events since his last triumph on June 17, 2008, at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway, but he’s finished second twice in the last four WoO LMS A-Mains – on Aug. 23 at Quebec’s Autodrome Drummond and Sept. 5 at Tri-City Speedway. He was denied the elusive checkered flag in both 50-lappers by Lanigan.

“We’ve had a lot of motor problems this year, but we’ve been working on a lot of stuff trying to get it better,” said Smith, who has recorded three of his six overall top-five finishes this season in his last four starts and has pulled within 36 points of ninth-place Chub Frank in the WoO LMS standings. “We finally hit on something here. My motor man (RaceTek) has been switching us over to a new-style (cylinder) head and it’s given us a lot better program.”

BACK ON TRACK: Austin Hubbard has already clinched the 2010 WoO LMS Rookie of the Year award – on the strength, of course, of a sensational season for an 18-year-old, first-year tour regular.

But while the talented, uninhibited youngster has authored some spectacular flourishes driving Dale Beitler’s familiar No. 19 cars – including reaching Victory Lane for the first time in just the fourth race of the season and climbing as high as fifth in the points standings – he’s had his rookie struggles as well. Most of the summer, in fact, has been a slog for Hubbard, which is why his third-place finish in Mohawk International Raceway’s ‘Battle At Eastern Door’ was so satisfying.

Before Hubbard ran third in Mohawk’s 100-lapper – a race he had a shot at winning until his car’s right-front toe-in was knocked out of whack due to a scrape with Tim McCreadie as he was bidding for the lead on lap 68 – he hadn’t scored a top-five finish since ending the Wild West Tour with a rain-shortened victory on July 9 at River Cities Speedway in Grand Forks, N.D., and a fifth on July 10 at Dakota State Fair Speedway in Huron, S.D. He had just four top-10 finishes over the ensuing 10-race span, prompting both Hubbard and his team to reassess their direction.

“We’ve been running pretty bad for the last month, so we figured we needed to do something to get better,” said Hubbard, who is currently seventh in the points standings. “During the week off (between New York’s Brewerton Speedway on Aug. 24 and Mohawk) we worked on the car hard and I rethought some of my driving. I kinda hung out for a weekend and cleared my mind, thought about what I need to do.”

The difference in Hubbard’s performance at Mohawk was impossible to ignore.

“The car was great,” said Hubbard, “and I’d like to think I drove it better than I had been.”

MORE TROUBLE: Tim Fuller added two more frustrating outings to his disappointing 2010 season, losing opportunities to contend at both Mohawk and Tri-City to bad luck.

Racing at a pair of tracks where he’s proven himself in the past – as a DIRTcar 358-Modified winner (Mohawk) and a WoO LMS victor last year (Tri-City) – the 42-year-old New Yorker settled for finishes of sixth at Mohawk (after a lap-40 spin forced him to rear of the field) and 23rd at Tri-City (retired on lap nine due to damage from his involvement in the Blair/Davies incident on lap two).

Fuller was almost at wit’s end as he loaded up his bent Gypsum Express No. 19 after Sunday’s A-Main at Tri-City. The inauspicious evening – as he tried to avoid spinning cars, the right side of his machine slammed into the large tire protecting the track’s turn-three wall – capped a four-race streak of absolutely horrible breaks for Fuller. After scoring his first top-five finish in nearly two months on Aug. 19 at Rolling Wheels Raceway in Elbridge, N.Y., Fuller proceeded to have a flat tire knock him out of second place on Aug. 23 at Autodrome Drummond (he finished eighth); get collected in a late-race tangle on Aug. 24 at Brewerton Speedway as he held fourth place; go spinning on a lap-40 restart at Mohawk while running second (he blamed the contact that sent him around on Hubbard, going as far as pulling in front of the young driver under caution to signal his displeasure); and see his Tri-City hopes evaporate before even having an opportunity to advance from the ninth starting spot.

With the exception of a two-race win streak in mid-June during the ‘Great Northern Tour,’ Fuller’s performance has fallen far short of his break-out 2009 season. Through 40 A-Mains this year he’s eighth in the points standings with two wins, six top-five and 19 top-10 finishes and $90,150 in earnings. Compare that to his statistics at the conclusion of the 40-race 2009 campaign: fourth in the points standings with seven wins, 17 top-five and 24 top-10 finishes and $137,150 in earnings (not including $35,000 in points-fund cash).

UNDER THE WEATHER: It’s been an uncharacteristically inconsistent season for Steve Francis – and after he battled to finish seventh on Sunday night at Tri-City, the 2007 WoO LMS champion was counting down the days to the end of the ’10 season.

“I’m looking forward to the year being over,” said Francis, who was hampered by flu-like symptoms throughout Sunday’s action and headed to the sanctity of his hauler moments after completing his 16th-to-seventh run. “I’ve never, ever said that before, but I’ve never had the ups-and-downs I’ve had this year.

“I don’t really know exactly why, but I’ve had runs this year like I’ve never, ever experienced in my life. At times my cars have been as good as I could ever ask for, and at times they’ve been as bad as I could ever ask for. We kinda want this year to get over with so we can work on building some new cars and getting everything right again.”

Francis is solidly fourth in the points standings, but his performance record has significantly sagged from 2009 when he was in the title battle until settling for second place on the final night of competition. This season he has two wins, 14 top-five and 31 top-10 finishes and $115,445 in earnings; last year he registered six wins, 25 top-five and 33 top-10 finishes and earned $167,885 (not including an additional $60,000 in points-fund cash).

TAKING ON THE WORLD: The WoO LMS is off this weekend, but nine of the top-11 drivers in the points standings are expected to enter the 40th annual World 100 on Sept. 10-11 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.

Only Fuller and Russell King do not have plans to compete in the prestigious DIRTcar UMP-sanctioned event, which carries a $43,000 top prize. Fuller will spend the weekend running big-block Modified shows in upstate New York while King has a Saturday-night date at Roaring Knob Motorsports Complex in Markleysburg, Pa., on his schedule.

At least five Outlaws will go to the post at Eldora with their cars sporting brand-new graphics and color schemes, including Lanigan (he only says his colors will be “different”); 2008 World 100 winner Shane Clanton (reportedly a red-and-black Georgia Bulldogs design); 2004 World 100 victor Chub Frank (green and black); Tim McCreadie (mostly black with white and florescent orange accents); and Clint Smith (some “slightly different colors” than he customarily displays).

LA SALLE OFF THE SKED: The WoO LMS event scheduled for Sun., Sept. 19, at La Salle (Ill.) Speedway has been canceled by event promoter Bob Sargent of Track Enterprises Inc., leaving four more points races on the 2010 schedule.

The WoO LMS stretch run features the Pepsi Nationals on Sat., Sept. 18, at I-55 Raceway in Pevely, Mo., and then three events at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C. – the World of Outlaws Late Model Showdown on Wed., Oct. 13, and the World Finals on Nov. 4-6.

Advance tickets are available for all the remaining WoO LMS events. The Pepsi Nationals, in fact, features a bonus offer of a FREE t-shirt from Pepsi (while supplies last) to fans who purchase tickets in advance at www.WorldofOutlaws.com/tickets or by calling the track at 636-479-3219.

Another attractive offer available to attendees of the Pepsi Nationals is a FREE pit-pass upgrade to admission tickets for fans who recycle a Pepsi 20-ounce bottle on race day.

Ticket information on The Dirt Track’s World of Outlaws Late Model Showdown and World Finals – the season-ending blockbuster weekend that also includes the World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series and, for the first time, the Super DIRTcar big-block Modified Series – can be obtained by logging on to www.charlottemotorspeedway.com or calling 1-800-455-FANS.

For more information on the WoO LMS, visit www.worldofoutlaws.com.