Jonathan Davenport described night 2 of the Silver Dollar Nationals as a “snoozer” after he won the race, but he offered his suggestions on how to improve the track so it can put on a spectacular race.
Davenport started in third, but worked his way underneath both Devin Moran and Garrett Alberson on the first lap to claim the lead. The track quickly became a one groove track with nearly everyone migrating to the bottom. To that point, Davenport attempted to work past Daniel Hilsabeck on the high side with 29 laps left in the 40 lap feature and he nearly got sucked into the outside wall. He did a fantastic job of keeping it off the wall while also maintaining his lead.
He stayed on the bottom the rest of the way until a caution came out for Carson Ferguson after he suffered a mechanical failure with his engine. Both Ricky Thornton Jr. and Brandon Sheppard were able to get the outside lane to work right off the restart. Thornton made his way around Moran while Sheppard got past Alberson, Moran, and Thornton on the outside, but was unable to get around Davenport, who did an excellent job at blocking, and eventually ran out of time.
In victory lane, Davenport told FloRacing’s Ben Shelton, “I’m not one to sugar coat anything, but that was about a snoozer there until Brandon [Sheppard] got up on the wheel there. I didn’t really know where to go. Corey was pointing me up, but I didn’t know if it was down there (he pointed to turn 1) or down there (he pointed to turn 3). So I was really just trying to block there. It got really rough around the bottom. Anyway, we was just good enough to hang on.”
As for the track, while discussing his battle with Sheppard at the end of the race Davenport stated, “That’s just one thing about this place being so narrow — I’ll have to go back and watch the video — but I’m sure he got a couple runs on me, but as I was going back to the bottom there’s just ain’t enough room to slide somebody.”
“If we could get them to widen this place out, take that berm down even more this place would race awesome,” he suggested. “I really think so, but until they do that I don’t think it’s going to be the spectacular race everybody wants to see. Maybe it will.”
Finally, Davenport encouraged the fans to bring out their friends to fill up the grandstands for tonight’s race, “Thanks for all these fans coming out. Y’all need to call everybody in your contacts because there’s still plenty of room out there to have some more fans in here. So let’s try to pack this place for $75,000 to win.”
With the win, Davenport reclaims the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series points lead. He now has a 10 point advantage over Ricky Thornton Jr., who finished third last night.
What do you make of Davenport’s comments?
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