Brandon Overton
The World of Outlaws Late Model Series will roll into east Tennessee on Friday and Saturday nights of this week to contest a pair of $10,000-to-win feature races at the historic Smoky Mountain Speedway. Among the competitors looking to claim victory in one or both of those events will be racer Brandon Overton. The former series Rookie of the Year was the winner in the lone WoO Late Models race staged on the Maryville, Tenn. track in 2017.
Overton comes into the weekend having experienced an early season filled with a series of ups and downs. The Longhorn by Weaver car prepared out of the Randy Weaver/Chip Stone shop in Crossville, Tenn. scored a $7,000 victory at East Bay Raceway Park back in February and has a total of five top-5 results so far in 2018, but there have also been eight finishes outside the top-10 for the No. 116 machine.
The Evans, Georgia driver currently ranks seventh in the WoO Late Models standings. He finished the 2016 season fourth in the tour’s overall point totals.
Overton believes several factors have contributed to the early season inconsistency.
“We’re just not quite where we want to be right now,” the 27-year-old driver admitted in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “They kind of threw us a little curve ball with the rules and stuff and we’ve been working on that trying to get everything back where we want it. I know we’re going to get better. We just ain’t had enough time because every time we go somewhere to race it seems like we get rained out. It’s just been a crazy start to the year. Probably last year, I’d say we had already run fifteen or sixteen times but this year we ain’t raced that much. That’s the biggest thing.”
Overton says that customers in need of new cars or maintenance to existing cars from the Longhorn by Weaver shop have also placed constraints on the crew’s time.
“Another thing, we’re a little behind because everybody has been working at the shop trying to get cars built for customers and that’s put us behind on our own stuff,” he pointed out. “We’ve just got to keep working on it and maybe it will come together this weekend.”
The racer known as ‘Big Sexy’ points out that the same fine tuning that has worked in the past has not necessarily provided the answers this time around. That has caused his team to seek new answers, even at some of the tracks they have visited in the past. However, he believes his team will find those answers in short order.
“When you get to running good you can go everywhere and you just click,” Overton declared. “With the adjustments you make you see at lot of similarities and you don’t venture off real far from where you’re at. This year, the places we’ve been going to we’ve done the same things we done last year and it’s not working the same. We’ve had to venture out and try different things, but I think a lot of it is just the lack of racing. Once we get to going and we hit on something, we’ll know which direction to go in.”
One thing that does remain for the driver and his crew is team chemistry. Overton and fellow Dream Team members Josh Gunter, Grant Pearl and Vinnie Guliani get along and communicate as well now as they ever have.
“Oh yeah, that chemistry is still there,” Overton insisted. “I don’t think it’s as much our team as it is just the circumstances. It took some getting used to when I first went there because I was used to working on my own cars myself and I was the one who called the shots. Now I have someone else there to help me make decisions. There’s stuff they’ve done in the past that worked for them and there’s stuff I’ve done in the past that worked for me so we’ve put all that together. This sport changes day-by-day and people get faster and they catch on to the stuff you were doing. We’ve just got to get some good runs and get something to build off of. We haven’t had a race yet where we went and done some stuff and said that really helped.”
Overton piloting the No. 116 earlier this year at Boyd’s Speedway
One place the Weaver/Stone team has really helped their driver pick up his game is the venue at which they will be racing this weekend. As stated earlier, Overton comes into the weekend as the defending champion of this race.
“I hated Smoky Mountain when I first started driving but when I started driving for Weaver I’ve been over there so many times it feels like home,” Overton said. “I’m looking forward to getting over there and racing this weekend.”
The 2017 Southern Nationals champion believes the two-day format at the same track will help his team find its rhythm.
“This two-day deal is going to help us being at the same track for two days,” he believes. “We’ve got a notebook from last year that tells us what we did. That’s going to be kind of an advantage, but the guys that are good everywhere are still going to be good. But we do feel like we’ve got a home turf advantage there.”
Further, now that the two national tours have separated, Overton looks forward to being able to size up the competition he will race against over the course of the long season ahead. Before last weekend, every WoO Late Models race had also included a number of drivers and teams from the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series due to the excessive number of rain outs experienced by both national tours.
Overton racing earlier this year with Lucas Oil regular Scott Bloomquist(0)
“The good thing about the Lucas guys running with us is that if you have a good night you can make up a lot of points because there’s going to be some guys mixed in there that aren’t going to be running the deal,” Overton pointed out. “But then if you suck, you could be on the back end of that deal. But these days when you go to the race track there’s ten or fifteen cars that could win the race. Everything has just got to fall right for you.”
