Shane Clanton
Shane Clanton has been one of the most successful Dirt Late Model racers in the country over the past couple of decades. The 2015 World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series champion can count famed Eldora Speedway’s World 100(2008) and Dirt Late Model Dream(2012) among his many victories. The Zebulon, GA driver’s 46 career feature wins on the WoO Late Models tour ranks him fourth all time on that series.
But when the 2020 season began, the longtime star on one of the sport’s national tours made the move to the other as Clanton and his Skyline Motorsports team opted to race with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series to better suit owner Greg Bruening.
“The main thing was the scheduling for our car owner,” Clanton replied to InsideDirtRacing.com when asked why he made the switch from one series to the other after such prolonged success. “He’s from Iowa and at the beginning of the year he could get to about 70% of the races because they were all seven or eight hours from his house and it wasn’t that bad of a drive. On the other tour, they were all 18 or 20 hours from his house.”
There was more to the story than just travel schedules that went into the decision.
“That was the number one reason but the other thing was that it’s always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to try this Lucas deal one time and see how tough it is over here and see if we could compete,” Clanton explained. “I know I can compete but they go to a lot of different places I truly suck at. But hopefully we can go another year and make better adjustments to get our car better and run better.”
Changing tours has taken the No. 25 Capital Race Cars team to several venues at which even this 45-year-old veteran driver has had little or no experience at.
“We have had to do a lot of learning on the fly and there’s some places that just don’t fit my driving style and I really suck at some of those of places,” the Georgia Bulldog pointed out. “The places I excel at, I’ve run good at. It’s a learning curve and we’re trying to do a lot of different stuff with our car to be able to make those adjustments and to make adjustments for the places I suck at. Hopefully next year we can do better than we’ve done this year.”
Shane Clanton in his Capital Race Car
Still, Clanton stands sixth in the LOLMDS standings with ten top-5 finishes along with 17 top-10 efforts. Having teammate Tyler Bruening and fellow Capital campaigner Billy Moyer, Jr. on the same tour has proven to be beneficial for all involved.
“Having my teammate Tyler and Billy Moyer, Jr. here lets us bounce information between those three cars and be three pretty good cars that qualify on the front row, and run decent in the heats, and in a lot of the features,” Clanton stated. “There’s some places that, like I’ve said, where we struggle and getting them to where we run good, we could win the points.”
Holding himself to high standards, Clanton is not satisfied with how his first run with the Lucas Oil series has gone up to this point. However, he hopes some of the upcoming races on tracks where he has found success in the past will produce the desired results.
“I haven’t won on the series so I would say that it’s an F,” he replied when asked to grade himself. “We want to win. Maybe in the next month or so when we go to some places that I like we can get at least one win out of this deal and maybe two in my home state of Georgia, at Dixie and Rome. Overall, we haven’t had a bad year and if it wasn’t for DNF’s we’d be top-three in points. We ain’t bad, but we still ain’t good.”
While no final decision for next season has yet been made, the 2010 winner of the Firecracker 100 at Pennsylvania’s Lernerville Speedway will be determined to succeed.
“We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do yet. We’ve got to look at the schedule, but when we commit to something we’re going to commit to it. Whatever we decide in December is what we’ll do.”
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