Cory Hedgecock’s No. 23 Brucebilt Rocket.
Winning is nothing unusual for Cory Hedgecock. Over the course of his relatively short dirt racing career, he has accumulated numerous first place trophies. As a matter of fact, the Loudon, Tenn. driver picked up a Crate Late Model victory this past Saturday night at Smoky Mountain Speedway when he edged Jake Teague in a virtual photo finish. But the 22-year-old competitor has even higher aspirations.
Just about a year ago, Hedgecock and his family owned team formed a partnership with longtime chassis builder Bruce Nunnally and his Brucebilt operation to enter selected Super Late Model races along with the Crate and Limited Late Model events they were already entering and winning.
So how does the driver think his development is going?
“It’s going good,” Hedgecock declared in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “Bruce is helping us in the shop with the car and we have a good motor program with Eagle. We feel like we’ve got a real good car in the Rocket, with doing the updates and everything the car seems to be getting better every week. Hopefully we’ll just keep on getting better.”
Chassis builder Bruce Nunnally and driver Cory Hedgecock
Having competed in essentially three different Late Model classes over the past couple of years, Hedgecock has learned the nuances of each type of machine he races.
“A crate is different in that you’ve just got to run them so hard and you can’t make any mistakes,” he explained. “A limited is a lot more forgiving just because they’ve got power, but you’ve still got to be aggressive with them because the race track can still take it. But the supers are just a whole different world. You’ve got to drive them on the starts or else they’ll blow the tires off on the starts. They’re just so much faster and everything’s happening faster. Things like tire choices and all that are just a whole different game in the supers. We’ve struggled with it, but honestly, I’ve been tickled with some of the things we’ve done in the super deal.”
By moving up in class, Hedgecock has found himself travelling away from home a bit more often than in years past. And according to the driver, there are positive and negative aspects of racing on the road.
“I enjoy running out of town because you don’t have to deal with all the drama around here that comes with running with the same people every week,” he explained. “But I definitely love these race tracks.”
Hedgecock plans to race in this Saturday’s unsanctioned $3,000-to-win Super Late Model event at 411 Motor Speedway. Despite having won on the Seymour, Tenn. track several times in the past, the No. 23 team recently tested on the 3/8 mile oval in order to put some new pieces of equipment through their paces.
“We were really fast,” Hedgecock said of the practice. “We were trying some different spring combinations and some other stuff like that. And we’ve got a new big motor, a 460 cubic inch wide bore motor, which is the first time we’d run one of those style motors. We wanted to see how they drive, and how they shut down and how they get into the corners.”
Hedgecock, who works alongside his grandfather and father in their Eagle Racing Engines shop, originally started out as a drag racer. But once he moved into the circle track world, he even surprised himself.
“I did not really expect to have this much success at this point in my career with only being my third or fourth full year,” he admitted. “Over the last couple of years things have slowed down a little bit, but we’ve just got some new cars and it’s taken us a while to learn the niche for those style cars. We didn’t roll out with the same combinations this year as we had last year at all. We’re going to roll out a new car soon, which will be our Super Late Model car. It’s the new B1, which is a Brucebilt car. It will be ready soon and we’ll start testing with it.”
