Jonathan Davenport chose not to run a national tour after running with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series the previous three seasons from 2023-2025, but he has some ideas on where he would like the tour to head moving forward.

At the beginning of the year, Davenport and his team explained they would not follow a national tour instead electing to pick-and-choose where they would race. The team announced 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.”

He would share more details about that decision in an interview with FloRacing’s Kevin Kovac, “At some point, you got to realize that it ain’t all about money. 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.”

Additionally, Davenport noted how he wanted to get to more local tracks, “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.”

To that point, Davenport shared with StockCarReport some of the places he would like the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series to go in the future.

“I just wish they would come back south after Florida, really. They go to Smoky Mountain in Tennessee, but after that you don’t have anything in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama. None in that area. I’d like to go to some of the Oklahoma tracks. Some of those look pretty cool. I see some Modified racing out there that looks really nice. Maybe venture out to some new states in Texas or something.”

“There’s always dirt tracks somewhere that we need to go,” he concluded.

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