Jonathan Davenport shared that he understands he’s likely to make less money doing a pick-and-choose schedule compared to a national tour with Lucas Oil or the World of Outlaws.

Earlier this month, Davenport and his Double L Motorsports team shared his plans to do a pick-and-choose schedule writing on Facebook, “The #49 team has elected not to follow a national touring series and will instead pick-and-choose where they compete during the course of the season. Jonathan will be in action at crown jewel events across the country, as well as high-profile races in between.”

“It will be a little different for us not running a series full-time or competing for a Championship, but at the end of the day, we’re still trying to win every time we unload,” Davenport said.

As for why he wasn’t going to run a tour, he pointed to wanting to spend more time with his family as well as competing at new track, “I am looking forward to being at my son Blane’s fishing tournaments more often and supporting him whenever I possibly can. I’ve always enjoyed going to new racetracks and might even be open to trying a different genre of racing.”

“We’ll still be all over the country chasing big money in the #49 like always,” Davenport continued. “But it will be refreshing to show up at all of these tracks because we want to and not because we have to be there for points. Not saying I won’t ever run for points again in my career, but it is just not in the cards for this year.”

Now, in an interview with FloRacing’s Kevin Kovac, Davenport acknowledged the pick-and-choose schedule is less lucrative, “I know I’m not going to make as much money. I know that for sure. I’m not going to win everything.”

“But at some point, you got to realize that it ain’t all about money,” he continued. “It’s about spending time with people you want to and to be places where you want to go.”

He also pointed to the freedom that it provides him, “Just like, you know, anything could happen to any of us at any time. And if, God forbid, if any of my guys get sick, any of their loved ones get sick, they can miss a race. I can’t. Like, no matter what happens, if we’re running a series and I miss that race, we’ve already killed the whole year.

Davenport added, “So just things like that, just looking back, I don’t want to have to be somewhere.”

He also reiterated how he wants to spend time with his family and especially his son, Blane, “These are the years my son’s growing and developing into a young man. I mean, I’ve got like five years or whatever and he’s graduating high school and he’s moving on with his own life.”

As for what his schedule might look like following the Wild West Shootout, Kovac noted that “Georgia-Florida Speedweeks action isn;t even on Davenport’s agenda at the moment, though he might end up entering a few races.”

Davenport did share that numerous tracks and promoters reached out to him to get him to come to their tracks, “We got a really good response from everybody wanting us to come race with them, so I said, I need to back off a minute. I have to figure out some way to give me a big calendar and write down all the tracks that race against one another on certain weekends before I can commit or whatever to something.”

Nevertheless, he teased heading to Iowa for Jeff Hoker’s Iowa Speedweek, “We’ll just kind of look at the schedule. I talked to [sponsor and promoter Jeff] Hoker a little bit there [at the Wild West Shootout], and he’s doing that Speedweek kind of deal in Iowa [in August], so there’s a couple tracks there possibly we might want to run.”

“Then just like Magnolia (Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss.), I like going there. Tazewell (Tennessee), I ain’t been there in a while. I’d like to go back home to Sugar Creek or Tri-County or North Georgia or something like that. Maybe racetracks around Batesville (the Arkansas home-base for his team) a little bit. There’s a couple of tracks in Tennessee I’ve never been to,” Davenport added.

He made a point that he wants to race closer to home in the Southeast, “Normally, the last few years, whenever we leave Speedweeks, besides Smoky Mountain, we do not race in the Southeast the rest of the year, besides Charlotte and Senoia at the end of year. There’s six, seven months there that I’m never racing around home ever, or haven’t been. We want to change a little bit of that.”

Additionally, he noted he wants to focus on smaller local tracks that don’t have a national tour show up, “One thing that kills the local tracks, I believe, are all the big guys never have time to go back to their home, or these local tracks, that have a local fan base. Yeah, we travel around and our big races get big crowds, but, these $10,000-, $15,000-to-wins at the local track that’s trying to stretch their neck out for their locals, they can never get the big guys to come in to bring the crowd. So I want to help out a little bit, you know. I feel like that’s going to help grow the grassroots part of it.”

While Davenport is running a pick-and-choose schedule for this year, he’s not ruling out a return to chasing a tour in the future, “There’s plenty of guys that are in their late 40s that can still run a national tour. I mean, Blane might want to go back on the road with me after he gets out of school or whatever. I’m just saying that there is a possibility that I can always come back and run a series, too, because the money is really, really good. But right now, I want to do what we all want to do.”

“And luckily, I’ve got great car owners, great sponsors, partners, that allow me to do that,” he said.

NEXT: Josh Rice To Tackle Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series And Chase Rookie Of The Year