Mason Zeigler was involved in an incident with Tyler Erb
Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship contender Tyler Erb was disqualified from Friday night’s Wrisco Winter Nationals action at East Bay Race Way Park following the fifth heat race of the night. During the late stages of that preliminary Zeigler attempted a slide job to pass Erb for a transfer spot into the feature. Contact between the two sent Erb up the track as Zeigler sped away and drove on to a runner-up finish in that race behind winner Jimmy Owens.
On the cool down lap, Erb passed by several cars and banged into the side of the No. 25z machine. The call came immediately from LOLMDS director Rick Schwallie to disqualify the Best Performance Motorsports driver for the remainder of the evening.
It was not the first time the two have had encounters with each other. Earlier in the week there had been contact between the young drivers. Also, an incident in 2020 had not been forgotten.
Going into the night, Erb was third in the overall Lucas Oil standings behind Brandon Overton and Devin Moran. The series is only counting five of each driver’s finishes out of the nine feature races that are scheduled to be contested during SpeedWeeks.
Following the incident, MavTV Plus reporter Dave Argabright spoke with Zeigler.
“I hate to get attention from controversy,” Zeigler declared. “That’s not what we’re here to do, we’re just here to race. We’re here to win races. There’s no doubt last night Tyler and I got together on the first lap and he used me up. Shortly after that I used him up and there was last year’s feature where he used me up.”
Tyler Erb was disqualified from Friday’s racing action
The Pennsylvania driver says that he and Erb are hard chargers who have encountered each other because of their similar styles.
“We’ve just found ourselves in that situation many times and I’m not going to say tensions don’t run high when we race together,” Zeigler added. “He races hard and I race hard. In that heat race, I just felt like we were racing hard and racing for position. I had a big run and I went to his inside and I actually felt like it was pretty clean, just hard racing. It was iffy, but it was just hard racing.”
Zeigler felt as if the post-race contact was unnecessary. Still, he regrets the ultimate outcome of the incident.
“I don’t know why he had to get into me after the race,” Zeigler went on. “I hate to see him get disqualified because he’s racing for points. It wasn’t my intention at all. I really would like to see him come and race in the feature with us, I mean that sucks for him and his team because they work hard too. Again, there was no reason for him to get into us at the end of the race. All he did was hurt himself.”
Erb, who won the feature at East Bay on Tuesday night, declined an interview opportunity with MavTV Plus.
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