Tony Stewart’s Eldora Speedway has hired championship-winning USAC driver and motorsports executive Levi Jones as general manager for the World’s Greatest Dirt Track.
The appointment serves as a homecoming for Jones, with the 42-year-old from Olney, Ill., having raced for Eldora Speedway owner Tony Stewart in the United States Auto Club (USAC) from 2006 until the midpoint of 2013, winning six of his seven USAC championships with Tony Stewart Racing.
Jones comes to Eldora from IndyCar, where he has been director of Indy NXT, the stepping-stone division to the flagship NTT IndyCar Series. Prior to his three-year tenure at IndyCar, Jones held numerous competition and executive positions with USAC, rising from national series competition director in 2015-2019 to executive vice president from 2019 until October 2021 when he joined IndyCar.
Jones will officially begin his general manager role at Eldora on Sept. 16 following IndyCar’s season finale at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway.
“On behalf of everyone at Eldora Speedway, we’re excited and grateful to have Levi Jones as our general manager,” Stewart said. “Levi has always held Eldora in high regard, both as a racer and as an executive. Now in his role as general manager, he combines a racer’s perspective with excellent managerial and promotional experience earned in USAC and IndyCar. Our fans and competitors should know that Eldora is in very good hands, just as it had been before.
Carved from a cornfield in 1954, Eldora has become a leader in motorsports growth and sustainability. The half-mile, dirt oval hosts some of the most prestigious grassroots racing events in the world, and 2024 is its 71st consecutive season of racing.
“Eldora is the track where everyone wants to win because you really have to earn it, and when you do, your name is on a list of legends,” said Jones, a two-time winner of Eldora’s 4-Crown Nationals (2005 and 2010). “There’s a lot of pride that comes with just competing at Eldora, and credit goes to track founders Earl and Berneice Baltes. They made Eldora a destination with constant improvement and innovation. Tony Stewart has done an incredible job of continuing all that Earl and Berneice created, and I’m honored to help carry on their vision.”
Jones’ first race as Eldora general manager will be the 4-Crown Nationals, which features consecutive nights of racing Sept. 20-21, headlined by the Kubota High Limit Racing winged sprint car series and the USAC Sprint Car, Midget and Silver Crown National Championship series.
I used to get to Eldora quite often when Baltes was the owner.
Truex’s last title shot
Martin Truex, Jr. crashed early in the recent Darlington race almost costing him a playoff spot. Fortunately he did make the playoffs and now is shooting for a title in his final season.
When you ask Truex Jr. how his relationship is going with Bristol Motor Speedway, you get an odd look, a smile and finally a chuckle. Admittedly, the relationship needs a little work.
In 34 Cup Series starts at Bristol, he’s managed to salvage just three top five finishes, and only five top 10s. When you look at his performance at other tracks it is well above average. For some reason he and Bristol just don’t get along.
“It’s never been my best track,” Truex Jr. said recently. “I don’t go there beaming with confidence, but over the years I’ve had a few opportunities.”
The driver of the No. 19 Bass Pro Shops machine will head to the .533-mile all-concrete, high-banked bullring for the final time as a full-time Cup competitor on Sept. 19 for the crown jewel Bass Pro Shops Night Race. As it stands today, he is in the Round of 16 Playoffs on points. That race is the cut-off race for the opening round of Playoffs and only 12 of the 16 championship drivers will advance to the next round once the checkered flag falls that night.
He would like nothing more than to grab a Playoff victory in front of his longtime sponsor Bass Pro Shops at their title race in pursuit of his second NASCAR Cup Series championship at the ultra-challenging Bristol Motor Speedway, and finally conquer The World’s Fastest Half-Mile.
When you say it like that, it sounds like the ending to a fairy tale.
Truex has seen BMS’s unique Victory Lane high atop the Ballad Health Care Center, just not from inside a Cup car. He won an Xfinity Series race at Bristol in 2004 and also claimed a Craftsman Truck Series victory on the Bristol dirt in 2021. He nearly grabbed that first Cup victory this past March, on St. Patrick’s Day, but Denny Hamlin got in the way at the end.
“We were so close there in the spring, I feel like, and I could taste it,” Truex said. “…Yeah, I guess this tire management thing fit into my wheelhouse.
“Man, the difference was just coming out of the pits so far behind Denny. I had to use mine up more on the last run. The last four, five laps of the race, was cord. (But) I gave it a hell of an effort.”
Should Truex get that Cup win next month he would join an elite list of drivers who have conquered Bristol in all three of NASCAR’s top touring circuits. Those drivers include Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski and Kevin Harvick.
“Man, it would be so awesome,” Truex said. “It would be incredible. Yeah, we’ve not had much luck there, but we’ve been getting better at it, I feel like, and in the spring, we ran really strong. It’s going to be a whole new tire situation and everything. Hopefully, we can go there and have a chance. It would be a cool race to win.”
Win or not, after this season Truex plans to set sail in a large body of water somewhere on the planet and throw out his fishing rod. That’s his ultimate happy place.
“Enjoy life, race a little for fun—I’m not sure exactly yet,” Truex said. Truex just recently announced that he is set to race in the Daytona 500 come February.
Williams Grove back in action
Williams Grove Speedway took a week off from racing before kicking off its final month of competition on Friday night, September 13, and featured a trio of Hoosier Diamond Series races to close out the year.
Sept. 20 will find Williams Grove offering the Diamond Series Kevin Gobrecht Challenge for the 410 sprints along with action for the 358 sprints.
And then the final Diamond Series race of the year comes up on Friday, September 27 when the 410s compete in the VP Race Fuels World of Outlaws Tune-up race as they ready for the October 4 and 5 Weis Markets/Sage Fruit National Open.
The 358 sprints will also see the champion crowned on Sept. 27 with the running of the final race of the season for the division.
The season will come to a spectacular end on October 4 and 5 with the running of the two-day, Weis Markets/Sage Fruit National Open sanctioned by the World of Outlaws.
Port Royal cancellation
Port Royal Speedway and the Short Track Super Series have made the decision to cancel the much-anticipated three-day race event scheduled for October: The Speed Showcase 50. After careful consideration, both parties have made this difficult decision due to challenges faced throughout the 2024 season, coupled with the need to focus on projects at Port Royal Speedway before the winter season sets in.
For updates and information, please visit portroyalspeedway.com and shorttracksuperseries.com.
Phelps defends Logano sanction
Austin Dillon caused a stir in the Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway, which prompted a consequential response from NASCAR.
Coming around Turn 3 and past Turn 4 on the final lap of the race, Dillon spun leader Joey Logano and then hooked Denny Hamlin out of the lead, helping Dillon win the race and punch his ticket to the NASCAR playoffs. Days later, though, NASCAR announced that it was stripping Dillon of the automatic playoff bid, taking 25 points off his season total and suspending spotter Brandon Benesch for three races. Dillon is still credited for the win, while Logano finished 19th and Hamlin still finished second.
On the latest edition of “Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps explained the sport’s perspective on stripping Dillon of the automatic playoff bid.
“I’ve heard from drivers over the years, ‘I don’t know where the line is.’ ‘Tell me where the line is.’ ‘Can you show me the line?’ I’m like, ‘I can’t show you the line, but you will know when it has been crossed. So, if you hook someone going 170 mph on a mile-and-a-half track, you have crossed the line, and we’re going to park you,” Phelps told host Harvick. “We’ve been consistent. We’ve had two of those. Do we want to do that? We don’t, but we need to make sure that we are keeping our drivers safe, and when you have a situation like that, it’s not safe. I think as we were looking at the data and what happened, it happened so quickly, but you had two incidents in a split second. Turn 3 you had an incident. Turn 4 you had an incident, and then the race was concluded.
“I think the bump-and-run or slam-and-run or whatever it was, I won’t suggest that there wouldn’t have been a penalty; I have no idea, because you had a second move, and the second move was a hook, in our opinion, which was both the eye test and the data would suggest that’s what happened. And then he put a competitor also at risk. Denny took a hard hit … there was a line that was crossed in our opinion.”
Phelps felt that NASCAR had to send a message about Dillon’s antics.
“If we hadn’t penalized it, then I think what we would see over the next 12 weeks would look significantly different,” Phelps said. “We just can’t have it. It really comes down to ‘what do you want your sport to be?’ And that’s why I think we ruled the way we did because we’re not demolition derby; we’re just not. We are a sport that if we had done nothing, we would’ve opened ourselves up for a mess, honestly.”
Ernie Saxton is an auto racing contributor for MediaNews Group. He co-founded the Eastern Motorsports Press Association, served as public relations director for Grandview Speedway for 47 years, and is in multiple halls of fame for his promotion and journalism related to the sport. He has announced races at more than 100 tracks, and he is the only person to have announced a race at Madison Square Garden. Email him at ESaxton144@aol.com.
Source: Berkshire mont
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