Jonathan Davenport has some suggestions for the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series’ Big River Steel Chase for the Championship.

This year the Big River Steel Chase for the Championship includes five races. The first two were held at Brownstown, the CJ Rayburn Memorial last Friday night and the Jackson 100 on Saturday night. The next will be at Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway this weekend for the 37th Annual Pittsburgher. The series then closes up with the Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora Speedway on October 18th.

It’s the same tracks and the same format as last year albeit there were two dates at East Bay on the calendar last year, but both of them got rained out. And it follows 2023 where there was a single championship race at Eldora.

Davenport shared his suggestions with DirtonDirt.com and specifically requested more tracks and different types of tracks. He said, “I think they’re really good tracks to keep, but I would like to see us not run two nights at the same track. I understand the path that our sport’s taking. We go to a weekend to be at one place, which is fine, and I understand that. That’s better on us (financially) also, but I think for the championship, it needs to have a little bit more diverse track conditions and just tracks in general. So we could have two tracks within a weekend that was close to one another and run both of them. I think that would be even better.”

While he had his suggestions for the Chase format, Davenport ultimately prefers a more traditional seasonal points chase. He said, “I’m kind of old school. Honestly, I’d rather just race the whole  year for a championship. Just like (Friday) night, I mean, me and Hudson are pretty much out of it. Just one bad night. It either needs to be the whole year or maybe if they’re going to do only four or five races or make it 10 races. You know, I think it ought to be a little bit longer than what it is.”

To Davenport’s point, following the weekend at Brownstown, he’s now 160 points behind current leader Ricky Thornton Jr. and Hudson O’Neal is 270 points behind Thornton.

One thing Davenport is not a fan of is the one-race championship. He commented, “It’s definitely better than the one night that they did the first year they’d done it. That was really unfair to Ricky, really. He was way out front, led (the points) the whole time, and then he had one bad night, and the lost pretty much his whole year in one race.”

“You know, there’s pros and cons to everything, but I see what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make it more exciting and get more clicks, more views, at the end of the year when everything veers off towards football. So, you know, we got to do what we can to stay in the limelight, to keep everybody coming and asses in the seats,” he added.

NEXT: Devin Moran Explains Contact With Jonathan Davenport During Jackson 100