Shanon Buckingham
Shanon Buckingham is a veteran competitor who has been involved in the sport of Dirt Late Model racing for a number of years. Still, there are many things to be learned no matter how much experience a driver and team might have. And the 2019 season proved to be part of the learning process for the 46-year-old driver and his Double Down Motorsports team as they took to the road for a full campaign on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series for the first time.
While the 2019 season did serve as a learning experience for this driver and team, all was not lost. Buckingham scored a LOLMDS win when he took the checkered flag at the Tazewell(TN) Speedway to earn $12,000 back in June. And according to the Morristown, Tenn. driver it was at that point when things began to turn around for the Roger Sellers-owned operation as DDM enjoyed a much more solid run during the second half of the season.
With that improved second half, Buckingham ultimately placed his No. 50 Longhorn Chassis machine tenth in the final Lucas Oil Series standings.
“I learned that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was,” Buckingham half-jokingly replied to InsideDirtRacing.com when asked what he learned over the course of this past year. “It really was a learning curve driving wise. I thought I could drive good enough to get the job done if we could get the car exactly right, and I still think I can, but there was a whole lot of things to learn like how to take a 15th place car and finish half better than that because that’s what those guys are good at. They know how to take chicken crap and make chicken salad out of it.”
The son of well-known Dirt Late Model crew chief Tom Buckingham went on to explain that success on a national tour often comes down to taking advantage of good situations while also making the most of the off nights. He points out that the drivers and teams who have been following the national series for years have learned exactly how to do that while drivers and teams new to the process have to learn those lessons largely on their own.
“The night’s that you’ve got a good car and good opportunities are not near as hard as the night’s when you’re off and struggling,” Buckingham explained. “That’s when you’ve got to find a little something special, especially early like at heat race time. Those guys are really good at starting with a deficit but making something good out of it by making transfer spots and making opportunities for a good starting spot in the feature so they’ve got time to go back and tune on their car so they’ll be ready for the feature. I think as a driver that I went to school on a lot of that. I think I learned quite a bit driving wise, just little things and subtle movements like ways to use the track and ways to use a competitor up without making him mad and just dooring him out of the way.”
There is no magic potion to sprinkle on the race car to make it better. The winner of the 2008 NeSmith Chevrolet Dirt Late Model Series World Championship knows that the key to success at this level is to keep moving.
“As a team it’s just a growing thing, you know,” he said. “All of us, Roger especially, keep waiting on the switch to flip but there’s not a switch to flip. I just think it’s a slow steady climb every week. You’ve just got to put yourself in position to do better and try to learn and be open to a few new things setup wise, driving wise, and everything. It’s a big learning curve but I think we’ve got a jump on it. We’re pretty pumped for this year because we’re adding a new crew guy and a new race car. We’re pretty excited and I think we’ll have a lot better season.”
The Double Down Motorsports Longhorn Chassis of driver Shanon Buckingham
Life on a circuit such as the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series is far from easy. Endless hours of travel to get from one race to the next coupled with having to maintain the race car out of the back of a hauler during cold spring and fall nights or blistering summer evenings rather than in a climate controlled shop can take their toll. Being well prepared at the beginning is essential when hitting the road for long periods at a time.
Buckingham along with owner Roger Sellers, crew chief J.C. Crockett as well as Tom Buckingham and Shane Crockett spent many hours travelling together over the course of the 2019 season
“I was talking to my wife about how we have a swing this summer where we’ll be gone for a month,” Buckingham stated. “We’re used to doing the maintenance and we’ve got good guys. J.C, man, he worries himself sick making sure he’s got everything that he needs. I don’t remember a single time last year where we had to borrow something or have something shipped very often. We’re pretty prepared for that. Roger affords us the resources to have everything we need and J.C. really stays on top of having all the parts we need. It’s a grind. We get up and do the same thing every day- we unload and we’ve all got our jobs that we do and occasionally we overlap. It’s more organized than what it may look like from the outside. It’s a job, but I’d rather be doing this than just about anything else.”
So what grade would the veteran driver give himself at the completion of his first full run at a national series?
“Man, I don’t know,” Buckingham sighed. “I believe I would almost give myself a failing grade for the first half. And I hate to do that because everybody on this team works so hard. We made some bad decisions, and I probably made more bad decisions than anybody behind the wheel. People say that in the second half of the season y’all did good and they ask if we hit on something, but I don’t know how to explain it. We were doing the same things as we were but we just weren’t making as big of swings at it.
“We had more confidence but confidence comes from success and I don’t know that you can have confidence without success,” he went on. “We still have our problem areas we need to work on but we’re going to work on those things. I’m not going to be one of those guys that’s just a bottom feeder, I’m going to run that top. Bobby Pierce isn’t the only person who can tear a quarter panel off. Roger has told me a hundred times that he would rather me do that than run mid-pack and not take a chance on moving forward so we’re going to have some DNF’s because we’re going to take some chances and go hard this year. There are conditions where we know we are the best race car on the track but it’s in the other conditions that we’ve got to work on.”
The Double Down Motorsports team will be back for another go on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series in 2020. Their goal is to win races and to finish in the top-5 in the final series standings.
The LOLMDS season kicks off at the Golden Isles Speedway in Brunswick, GA on January 31st.
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