Spencer Hughes
After PCC Motorsports parted ways with Kyle Strickler in early May, the Craig and Shannon Sims-owned operation turned to young Spencer Hughes of Meridian, MS to take the wheel of their Longhorn Chassis racing machines. During Saturday night’s Valvoline Iron-Man Late Model Series event at Smoky Mountain Speedway the move began to pay dividends.
After Hughes led Group B qualifying, he started the 40-lap feature race from the outside of the front row. The No. 11 machine showed the way for the first 11 laps until Hudson O’Neal took over on his way to the win while Hughes ended the evening as the runner-up. That effort came on the heels of a 10th place result in one of the two Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series races held at Magnolia Motor Speedway earlier in the weekend in the 20-year-old driver’s home state.
Although the World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series-sanctioned race at Indiana’s Circle City Raceway did not go as well as hoped, Hughes and PCC Motorsports did succeed later on in making the field for the Saturday night portion of Dirt Late Model Dream double header at Eldora Speedway. According to the young driver, up and down results such as these are not necessarily unexpected considering the steepness of the learning curve.
The team hopes their second-place effort at the Maryville, TN track this past Saturday will serve as a good indicator for things to come when they return to east Tennessee in July for the big Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series weekend at the 4/10 mile clay oval.
“We struggled our first couple of nights out but this thing is a little bit different from what I’ve worked on the past couple of years in Late Model racing,” Hughes pointed out in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “Hat’s off to Craig and all them. I guess he took a pretty big risk because I’m 20 years old and my crew guys are 19 and 18 so to let us come in and him give us all the stuff we need to race right, I know that takes a lot of faith so I’m just real appreciative of that. I’m glad we finally put together a good, complete night of racing even though we came up one spot short. It wasn’t bad for our first time here. Hopefully we got some good notes for that Lucas race here in a couple of weeks.”
In 2020, Hughes got some experience travelling with a regional tour as he took part in the Comp Cams Super Dirt Series, ultimately winning two features. He believes that experience, along with what he is now getting with the PCC team, will go a long way toward making him a better driver.
“We were in the Comp Cams Series last year with Bill Langston’s Capital Race Car, we won a couple of races and ran good in a lot of them,” the driver who began racing go-karts at age 6 recalled. “Just travelling up and down the road and getting to go to all these different places, you might go and get your tail kicked for a while, but at some point it’s going to start paying off. It’s just part of it. The only way to be the best is you’ve got to beat the best so you’ve got to get out away from your house and race against the guys that are faster than you and that’s the only way you’re ever going to get better. You’ve just got to get out there and get after it and that’s all you can do.”
The Mississippian hopes the deal with the Indiana-based team will extend beyond its current temporary status.
“I really don’t know,” Hughes said when asked of his future with PCC. “Craig called and asked me if I wanted to race at Eldora and I absolutely did. So we got everything ready then we talked about Magnolia and we might go down there. It(Saturday night’s Clash at the Mag) rained and this was kind of on the way home. Right now, we don’t necessarily have a set schedule. We’ve got a couple of races picked out, actually a good bit of races picked out, toward the end of the month. I don’t really know what our future plans will be but I really do enjoy it and maybe he does too so we can keep this deal together for a while.”
The PCC Motorsports No. 11 Longhorn
Gaining as much experience as possible in as many different places as possible over the remainder of 2021 is key for this racer who before Saturday had only raced at three other tracks in Tennessee(Crossville, Duck River and Clarksville). That’s the only way he and his crew members can learn how to handle the nuances of racing at a high level in Dirt Late Model competition.
“I think the only thing we can do is just race as much as possible from right now to when SpeedWeeks starts, if that is the plan,” Hughes declared. “There’s going to be nights that go real good and there’s going to be nights that go real bad but we’ve got to learn from every single one of them. We need to put ourselves in a lot of different situations and try to figure how to get out of them and make the best of them. I’ve never raced much up here(Tennessee). Racing in this part of the country is a little bit different, the dirt’s a little different so we’ve got to get out this way more and out on the east coast some or maybe just all the different places we come across. That’s the only way we’re going to get better.”
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