Jonathan Davenport
Jonathan Davenport currently finds himself leading the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series standings. While that’s certainly a good thing, it’s not necessarily something he and his K&L Rumley Enterprises team had counted on when the 2015 season began. As a result, the Blairsville, Georgia driver and crew are now seriously considering a departure from their initial plan of just running in select races in favor of competing for the championship with that national touring series.
Davenport came out of the Georgia/Florida Speedweeks segment of the racing schedule in good shape. The No. 6 Longhorn Chassis car set fast time on each of the three nights of competition at the Golden Isles Speedway and won one of those features. After a week of racing at East Bay Raceway Park as solid contenders, the team went to Ohio and won the LOLMDS race at the Atomic Speedway.
“At the first of the year, we weren’t even planning on trying to run Lucas,” Davenport said in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “But now everything just worked out in Florida really well. Then we went to Atomic and won that race, and now we’re the points leader.”
The former Southern Nationals champion went on to explain that a decision on whether or not to run the full LOLMDS tour will depend on a number of factors, with his team’s success in upcoming races being the primary consideration.
“We’re probably going to ride it out until we fall back in points or we have somewhere one weekend where we really want to go that’s paying more and the other is a little bit longer travel,” Davenport explained. “We’ll just have to see what fits us better. But as far as right now, we’re going to go to the next couple and probably try to go to all of them through the Show-me 100. We’ll follow all the races up until then and then make our main decision after that.”
Davenport says that having a full season’s worth of experience in 2014 with car builder Kevin Rumley and a new chassis is now paying big dividends.
“We really came out of the box strong last year and that gave us a whole season on this new Longhorn car,” the 31-year-old driver declared. “Me and Kevin put our heads together back again this winter and came up with some new ideas, changed a few things on this new car, and it’s been really good everywhere we’ve gone to so far.”
Rumley began serving as the lead engineer with the chassis building enterprise owned by former NASCAR champions Bobby and Terry Labonte back in 2012. He then brought Davenport in to drive for AES Racing in 2013 and the results have been trending upward ever since.
“We didn’t change a whole lot when I got in them, but we changed a little from that first year that they ran them,” Davenport pointed out of the Longhorn Chassis. “We’ve been getting a lot more drivers in them and getting a lot more feedback and that’s really helped our whole program out for our customers and us.”
Jonathan Davenport’s AES Racing #6
Davenport has made a previous attempt at running the full Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series back in 2012 when he drove for Clint Bowyer Racing and earned ‘Rookie of the Year’ honors, finishing 7th in the overall standings. He believes that experience has him better prepared for the next time he tackles a national tour.
“We’re always learning, like on how to be prepared when you’re out on the road,” Davenport commented. “You have to be able to maintain the car as good or better on the road as you can when you drive back to your shop.
“All those guys are tough and they’ve been doing it for years,” he said of the LOLMDS competition. “Once you trip and fall one time, they just keep kicking you and you can’t ever get back up. You have to prepare yourself mentally and all your equipment for that kind of situation. That’s what me and Kevin have been doing the last couple of weeks just in case we do decide to run that(Lucas Oil tour).”
The next Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series race will be on Saturday night(April 11) at the Jackson Motor Speedway in Byram, Miss.
