Randy Weaver
It has been a season filled with ups and downs for Crossville’s Randy Weaver.
The former Southern All Stars champion went into 2014 looking to run the full Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series schedule, and he led the ‘Rookie of the Year’ standings in that series after the first few weeks of competition. However, Weaver had to drop off the LOLMDS tour after his father was diagnosed with a series illness a couple of months ago.
“It’s definitely been busy,” Weaver admitted. “There’s some of it I wish we hadn’t had to go through. We were leading the points for the rookie deal on the national tour because we hadn’t ever run a national tour before. When my dad got ill, we had to jump off that thing because he’s definitely more important than all of this. His treatments will be over on Wednesday and hopefully we’ll be able to go back and see that it’s shrunk a great deal or it’s gone. That would be great.”
Since his father’s diagnosis, Weaver’s racing schedule has been sporadic. And the driver is thankful for a team that has been understanding of his situation. Adding to the uncertainty of recent weeks, the Outlaw Racing Southest team decided to make a major change. But it is proving to be a change in the right direction.
“The race team has really stuck behind me,” Weaver declared. “I haven’t been able to race as much as I wanted to because I just didn’t have my head on straight. Then in the middle of racing here and there we decided to switch chassis.
Randy Weaver drove his Longhorn chassis to victory at both Smoky Mountain and North Georgia.
“Kevin Rumley is a good friend of mine and he had been on me for about a year, but we never quite had the right situation to do it,” the driver known as ‘The Dream; continued. “But now we’ve done it after we met with Terry Labonte over there at Longhorn. Everybody has jumped in there with open notebooks and really helped us. Of course, I’ve always had really good equipment since I’ve been with Chip Stone and all these guys. Hopefully now we can get our head on straight and show them what kind of good equipment we have.”
Going into the upcoming Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals presented by Old Man’s Garage, Weaver is coming off one of the most successful weekends of his career. The driver of the #116 Longhorn demolished the Ultimate Super Late Models Series competition at the Smoky Mountain Speedway and the North Georgia Speedway on successive nights back on July 11 & 12.
Weaver has plans to at least run the first two Southern Nationals races at Wythe Raceway in Rural Retreat, VA and the 411 Motor Speedway in Seymour, TN on July 21 & 22. But his plans are always subject to change.
“If you look at my schedule, we had to take everything off the website,” Weaver explained. “We try to update it a couple of weeks out, but honestly, I do it mostly week to week. It depends on if my dad has a good week. My sister works at the burn unit at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville and she just got through her period of starting a new job so she can take off on the weekends and can stay with him. I handle it through the week and it’s worked out better for me. It eases my mind with her there. We’re still going to try to keep it fairly close to home. If he’s having a good week the week of the World 100, I’m going to go there. If he’s not, I’ll be at his house.”
