Look through the list of Dirt Late Model crown jewel winners at Eldora Speedway and Tim McCreadie’s name sticks out. He’s a superstar in the division, sure, but he’s also the rare driver who’s reached the mountaintop at the famed half-mile oval in Rossburg, Ohio, without having dreamed of the achievement as a kid or even from the start of his racing career.

The 49-year-old McCreadie is, of course, from Watertown, N.Y., and grew up watching his father, Bob, become a legendary big-block modified racer, so Dirt Late Models — and Eldora — simply weren’t on his radar. When he began racing himself in 1996 in the Northeast’s small-block modified class, his ultimate goal was to duplicate what his father had done in 1986: win big-block modified racing’s most prestigious race, the Syracuse 200 held annually in October as the finale of Super DIRT Week at the one-mile New York State Fairgrounds oval in Syracuse, N.Y.

McCreadie wasn’t oblivious to the significance of Eldora’s World 100 and Dream events to the Dirt Late Model world, but Super DIRT Week was at the center of his universe.

“You knew it was obviously a big deal based off of (reading) the (trade) papers — back then it was all papers — and when they ran their big shows, whether it was Late Models or sprints, they were covered so you got to see things like that,” McCreadie said. “You just don’t really know how big something is until you’re there in person.”

McCreadie has been there at Eldora, racing a Late Model in the middle of that super-charged atmosphere, for nearly two decades now. His first crown jewel appearance was the 2004 Dream, and since then he’s entered 36 majors at the track (Dream, World 100, Million, 2020’s Covid-year invitationals), started the headline feature 32 times and registered two victories (2018 World 100, 2020 Dirt Late Model Stream), 13 top-five and 18 top-10 finishes.

What’s more, McCreadie has established himself as an all-time Dirt Late Model great with three national titles (two Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series, one World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series) and triumphs in almost all of the sport’s biggest events. He’s actually more Dirt Late Model driver than big-block mod racer now — he has, after all, won Late Model’s marquee show but still stands without a victory in the 200-lap Super DIRT Week big-block modified race held at New York’s Oswego Speedway since the Syracuse Mile’s closure in ’15 — though he has a hard time grasping that fact.

“That’s wild, and until you said it I probably couldn’t have told you that was the case,” McCreadie said when reminded that he made his first Late Model start more than 20 years ago. “You consider yourself the guy that came from modifieds, but really, I’ve run Late Models more, so I guess it doesn’t really fly as much as it used to.”

McCreadie’s path to his Late Model debut on Sept. 28, 2002 — at Eldora, of all places — came sort of organically. He already knew some Late Model standouts from the Northeast like Rick Eckert and Chub Frank thanks to racing his modified alongside them at various tracks (Volusia, Hagerstown) and spending time with them at trade shows; in fact, he said Frank’s wife, Mary, was the first person to suggest he should give Late Models a try during a conversation at an offseason show outside Philadelphia, Pa. In addition, he became close in the late ‘90s and early 2000s with members of the Avon, N.Y.-based Sweeteners Plus Racing team that fielded modifieds for owner Carl Myers’s stepson, Vic Coffey, and another driver, and in 2001 the Sweeteners Plus operation added a couple Dirt Late Models to the stable that Coffey and his then teammate Danny Johnson ran during Georgia-Florida Speedweeks and a handful of other events. McCreadie hung out with the Sweeteners gang in 2001 and ’02 while Coffey raced at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., and also stopped periodically at the team’s shop in western New York, where the Late Model that Johnson drove a few times in ’01 caught T-Mac’s eye during the summer of ’02.

“Vic would let us work and wash (at the Sweeteners Plus shop) and they had them (Late Model) cars sitting there,” McCreadie said. “There was one for Danny (who departed the team’s modified program in October 2001) and one for Vic. I always thought, Man, it would be neat to try one. A few weeks later Vic said if I was interested I could come to work on it and put it together, and that’s kind of how we came to take it to Eldora (for 2002’s Johnny Appleseed Classic that was run with the track’s first-ever Super DIRTcar Series event for big-block modifieds).”

McCreadie wasn’t very well-versed in Late Model rules back then, though, and the car he unloaded at Eldora to pull double-duty in ’02 wasn’t quite up to spec.

“The bodies had changed a little bit back then,” he said. “Not like drastically, but in my opinion they looked, I’m not gonna say bad, but they just looked like a little bit ancient. I thought, You know what you could do this thing? You could put more angle in the hood and make the fenders roll really good. And if you really raised up the left-side body and then got the right side shorter, just made it all flow a little different, it would look wicked cool. And if we get a shorter roof on this thing …

“I didn’t even really look at the rulebook. I think I raised the left side up 3 or 4 inches comparable to where they were and I could barely get in the damn car because it was so high and the window was so small. And the back (deck), God, if I can remember, it was like 41 inches off the ground, and I think tech was 38 inches and we couldn’t get it down.

“I didn’t realize they were gonna do all that tech,” he continued. “You’d heard stories and all that about the million dollar race that had some tech, but when you experience tech in a different division, you think, Ah, my tech’s tough too. We go to Syracuse and we have tough tech. So you roll in there and these guys are teching like it’s the World 100, and we tried to put this thing down, we cut the T-bar in the back and the spoiler, but we couldn’t get it down more than 2 inches, and (the tech official) finally just said, ‘Don’t ever come back here like this if you’re ever gonna do this again.’ He knew we didn’t race these cars so they let us run, which we didn’t even make the race anyway.”

McCreadie’s first Late Model competition was inauspicious.

“I think we were decent in practice, but when I went out for qualifying, it was one lap, and when I went to take the green I pushed the clutch pedal in instead of the brake going into (turn) three because I’d never really had three pedals,” he said. “I never practiced the car at all, and our clutch in a modified is a hand-clutch, so when I (mistakenly) shoved the clutch in I shot up the track and almost hit the wall, I turned completely sideways and came straight down the track and almost clipped the guy that was going in the pits to scale.

“So then I was, like, wheelhopping all the way onto the straightaway, and I think I qualified about dead last. We got better and passed cars and I think we only missed (the feature) by about one (spot), but that was it.”

McCreadie didn’t realize it at the time, but the future course of his racing career had been set that day at the Big E. Not long after that, he was hired as Coffey’s teammate to run a modified full-time for Sweeteners Plus in 2003. The team’s Late Models certainly provided some extra incentive for McCreadie to join the outfit, and he jumped right into one during ’03 Speedweeks. He went on later that year to run the Johnny Appleseed Classic again during the Super DIRTcar Series’s return to Eldora — this time he made the feature field — and do some November Late Model racing in the Southeast, setting the stage for him to win his first career Late Model feature in a February 2004 DIRTcar-sanctioned event at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., and chase the fledgling WoO tour’s Rookie of the Year honors that season.

Diving head-long into the Late Model ranks in ’04 brought McCreadie to Eldora that June for his first Dream. He cracked the 100-lapper’s starting field, finishing a respectable seventh, and has entered ever Dream since then; he’s missed only two World 100s over the same period, skipping the ’04 edition because he was still in contention for the Super DIRTcar Series points that year and ran a big-block race in New York and the ’07 World during his single season down south running NASCAR Xfinity and ARCA stock cars.

McCreadie immediately recognized that the magnitude of Eldora’s crown jewels “was just like DIRT Week in the best days of DIRT Week,” but the rhythm of the weekend was decidedly different. Eldora’s action was contested under the lights while Syracuse’s Super DIRT Week competition came during the daylight hours, a schedule difference that shortened a driver’s recovery time from any postrace revelry.

“They had (bon)fires that were out of control, people fell in the fire, throwing everything in there,” McCreadie said of Super DIRT Week at the Syracuse Mile. “But then you gotta get up in the morning, which was tough (after having late-night fun). We started at 10:30 in the morning with practice or whatever. At least at Eldora you don’t have to get up early the next morning.”

McCreadie acknowledged that Eldora’s atmosphere “was an amazing thing,” but he also admitted that it took him a long time to fully grasp just how electric the place is.

“I’m not gonna lie, and this is probably gonna sound bad, when I finally won the World 100 was when I really realized how huge it was,” McCreadie said. “You know, there was a lot of times there (before his ’18 victory) that I got lapped, and there was no getting your lap back so I was in the infield at lap 50 or whatever because the pay was the same from a certain position on back so I just pulled in and watched. And by the end of the race you’re trying to load up and get out of there, so I wasn’t even on the fence watching (the finish or victory lane).”

There were some flashes of the famous roar from Eldora’s crowd that McCreadie experienced before his victory in October 2018 (that year the World 100 was postponed one month by rain), but those moments still weren’t the same as when he felt the adulation of the whole place as a World 100 winner.

“I remember a big reaction when Scott James got passed at the Dream,” McCreadie said, recalling James’s late-race loss to Scott Bloomquist in 2006). “I thought he had the race won so I took a shower and I come out and the place was going completely bananas. I thought, Man, they really love the fact that this James won. Then somebody told me, ‘No, he got passed with like two to go.’ That’s probably the first time that I saw that crowd could really, like, go nuts.

“And when Scott Bloomquist crashed that chrome (25th anniversary) car (during practice for the 2005 World 100) … I know there wasn’t maybe a complete full grandstands there yet, but that place went completely freakin’ bananas. It was just an enormous reaction between people cheering and people just reacting, because he hit hard. Like, I was on the trailer watching, and when he went down into (turn) three I thought, He’s not gonna make it. I don’t know what failed or whatever, but man, that was a hit.

“I’d been on the stage for a couple ($10,000-to-win prelims), some smaller stuff, but when you win (a crown jewel) it’s a little different reaction,” he added. “You see all them people and they’re just going crazy. It was right up there with when I won the small-block race at Syracuse (in 2012). (Winning) those races like that are just amazing. You get a lot of fanfare, a lot of electricity, at a lot of races, but you don’t get what you get (at Eldora). It’s probably because of the shape of the stands — you’re in a bowl and everything is loud. It’s a different experience, that’s for sure.”

McCreadie understands that everything at Eldora is accentuated, everything is ramped up to a higher level.

“To be going there for 20 years … the beauty of that place, no matter what happens and what year, you can remember it,” he said. “All those memories are there for all of us. The bad’s are always there a little more just because you’re like, ‘Man, I could’ve took advantage of that,’ like the Million (last year). That was a tough one, just because I felt like I found a part of the racetrack … I do run the bottom, but I found a part in the bottom that nobody was really in, and that’s satisfying as a driver because that just means you’re willing to take a risk to get better. I was making time (to nose into the lead on laps 84 and 86) … I think (Jonathan Davenport) might’ve still beat me anyway — I don’t think the flat (tire with two laps to go) cost us the win — but I would’ve liked to gone down swinging.

“You don’t forget the heartbreaks, and the wins … to this day (the Eldora victories are) some of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ll remember the Stream (June 2020’s $50,000-to-win, Covid-year replacement for the Dream) to the day I die. People forget it because it was a one-time thing, but technically it was the Dream that year, so in my mind we’ve won ‘em both. We just didn’t get paid (the six-figure amount) for the Dream.”

He paused, and then added about winning the Stream in front of an empty grandstand: “That was weird, that was another weird feeling, eerie. But you know what? All them guys (on his Paylor Motorsports team) were yelling and that kind of made up for that. You had your five guys or whatever who could be there hooting and hollering. That was a wicked memory, too, but nobody will probably ever talk to me about it. It’s a forgotten race. Maybe some guy 20 years from now will say he watched it on Flo (Racing) or whatever, but they never mention it.”

McCreadie’s World 100 checkered flag certainly holds its own special memories for him. It came at the end of a difficult 2018 season, one in which he ended up traveling most of his highway miles, including those to Eldora, using a dually pickup with a single-car enclosed trailer.

“What I thought the best part about it was, it was kind of like validating,” he said of his victory. “The best part was the people who came over and acknowledged what we had done. We had as much money as anybody in the cars and we were the Longhorn house car, but we didn’t have a big trailer. (Crew chief) Phil (Snellen) had to come from down south and I had to come from up north. (Longhorn’s) Matt (Langston) and Justin (Labonte), and (engine builder) Bill Schlieper … it was kind of like a mini-team, and all of us were trying to do the best with the cars we were dealt. And it was nobody’s fault — it was up to me to get the (CDL) license to drive the truck and I couldn’t do it, and then we kind of got racing and rolled with what we had.”

One moment from McCreadie’s post-World 100 celebration in the pit area still stands out.

“Kevin Rumley came over … he had a little bit to do with it with some front-end stuff he changed about a month earlier, and we got joking about how (McCreadie’s longtime friend) Mike Amell and I, when we won (in a big-block) at (New York’s) Brewerton (Speedway) one night by like a bumper and we were hanging out (afterward) and we said, ‘You know what? What if we just drove this hauler around the track a couple times?’ And that was probably not smart just because we were going way faster than we should’ve been, but I was telling Rumley and all these guys this story and somebody, ‘Well why don’t you guys do it now?’

“Well, Phil’s like, ‘I’ll do it,’ because him and Amell were good friends, and we jumped in that (dually) and it wasn’t supersonic, but we went around there. Rumley, I believe, filmed it, or Ernie (Morrison), and that’s something you’ll just cherish the rest of your life because they didn’t bother us. It was like the old days — nobody came with cops trying to tell you you’re a hoodlum.

“Then I got in my car (to start the drive home) and I couldn’t find a hotel room,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “I drove to the other side of Mansfield (Ohio), which once you’re up to 4 or 5 in the morning it’s late to get a hotel, and I didn’t realize they had a lot of stuff going on in Ohio so it was tough to get a hotel room anyway. So I just slept in a rest area. How about that? I just won the World 100, and I’m dirty and sweaty with no shower and I’m sleeping in my car. It was just like it was for so many guys before me. It was special, very special. You don’t look at it much because you’re racing, but I might never do it again.”

McCreadie is hopeful, though, that he can add more Eldora glory to his resume before he hangs up his helmet. His recent returns at the tracks — top-five finishes in seven of the last eight crown jewel finales — makes it appear that he’s in his prime at the high-banked oval, though he’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to match the multiple victories of such stars as Scott Bloomquist, Billy Moyer, Donnie Moran, Jonathan Davenport and Brandon Overton.

“I’ve just never been able to get on that train of, like, you just knock out five wins in the same race,” McCreadie said. “I’ve won a lot of races and almost all of (the crown jewels), but I just know it’s amazing to me how they do it. If you would’ve asked five, six, seven years ago if somebody would win (at Eldora) like Moyer and Bloomquist won, I’d say, ‘No way. There’s just too many good guys.’ But J.D.’s doing it, and Overton’s another one.

“Anybody who can win multiple races at places like that … yeah, that’s why they’re the best. But I’m happy where I’m at. My career hasn’t had as many as I’d like to get, but we do it as good as we possibly can, which has been cool.”

The veteran’s savvy McCreadie now possesses makes him formidable in every long-distance Eldora event.

“If you can make your car so good you don’t have to be a wildman out there,” he said, noting that his Donald and Gena Bradsher-owned team has provided him the resources to be a consistent contender. “You can just conserve and drive normal, and the next thing you know they start coming back to you.”

McCreadie will concede, though, that simply racing at Eldora gives him a thrill he can barely explain.

“When you roll in and see all those people that are coming out all the time now, it’s definitely a rush,” McCreadie said of Eldora. “I mean, it’s a huge rush even to this day. Not many people from New York race at Eldora so I usually get to hold the (state) flag (during prerace ceremonies), so it’s pretty cool to see the whole thing. You try not to think about it because you got a job to do, but you can’t sit back and not get pumped up. When you got somebody that sings the national anthem really good, and they have the horses (running around the track), if you can’t get fired up with that you might be in the wrong sport.

“I’ve been known to be a guy who’s probably too intense for the situation. Even my jokes are more of a dig than a joke,” he added. “But I love going there.”

Ten things worth mentioning

1. McCreadie will enter this weekend’s Dream XXIX behind the wheel of the same Paylor Motorsports Longhorn Chassis that he debuted in April 18’s Castrol FloRacing Night in America season opener at Eldora. The machine has been awaiting Dream action in the Longhorn shop since he piloted it to a runner-up finish in the 50-lap feature nearly two months. “We’re in a unique position where we can have a car sitting,” he said. “That’s something I’ve never done. Usually we’re racing and once I settle into a car I really like, that’s just what we run. This year I’ve run all three of the cars we’ve got. I’m not gonna say this (Eldora) one was the best we’ve got, but I’ll tell you, we ran second, it had speed and ran times in the heat like I’ve never run there — in the low 15s — so in my opinion, if it can run that fast in a heat, if I do a terrible job driving it in time trials I can maybe maneuver up through. According to McCreadie, his “biggest problem” at Eldora “has always just been getting in the (headline) race” with a good starting spot. “Sometimes I just don’t feel good when the track’s slippery and so wet that you’re spinning the tires a little bit,” he said. “I’ve never mastered that yet.”

2. McCreadie noted that Eldora’s postrace fun now centers around get-togethers at a bar in a barn outside turns three and four, but he preferred hanging out by the bar underneath the covered grandstand. “When (the party) was under the grandstands, open till 1 or 2 in the morning, you’d be sitting in the grandstands,” he said, “and there’s nothing that takes away that sightline of having a beer with all your buddies or families or whoever, and just talking about racing and seeing the lights on all the time and seeing the haulers and maybe seeing a guy down there and yelling to him because once it’s quiet you can almost here anything.”

3. When I asked McCreadie where he keeps his World 100 winner’s trophy, he replied that it’s not even in his possession. “I took one to (Sweeteners Plus owner) Carl (Myers) before he passed away (last year) and I think Vic (Coffey) is giving it to Eddie Burgess (a friend of McCreadie and the Sweeteners Plus team) who lives in Cincinnati,” he said. “The other one was on display with Terry Labonte’s (Winston) Cup championship car at the old Longhorn shop, the front part where you walked in. I don’t know if it’s there now (in the new shop).”

4. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though, that McCreadie doesn’t have his World 100 hardware. “I’ve just never been a trophy guy,” McCreadie said, noting that he’s given most of the trophies he’s won to kids or crew members. “They are cool and I have some, like I have the Wood-Tic (from Merritt Speedway in Lake City, Mich.) that they made and I have that big NAPA head from Deer Creek (Speedway in Spring Valley, Minn.) because my son was born the day before. I have the Lucas (Oil Series) championship trophy and the Chili Bowl trophy, just because it’s so little, it’s the smallest trophy in America. But it’s one of those things — I never really had a big office to put all that kind of stuff in, and when I get home I don’t really stay in that mode of racing. I’m not full-time, 100 percent racing. I mean, I’ll talk racing all day, but it’s never been about, ‘Hey, look what I did.’ When I retire — which, hell, might not be that far off — it might be neat to look at (trophies), but at the end of the day I already know that we did it. And if it brings somebody else a lot more happiness (to have them) than me, that’s fun.”

5. McCreadie’s mentality toward trophies derives from his father Bob, who also never became attached to the many pieces of hardware that he collected during his Hall of Fame big-block modified career. As a kid, McCreadie recalled seeing his father’s team put engine rods and oil in the bowl-shaped trophies that Bob received for winning Super DIRTcar Series events. And Bob also no longer has the trophy from the most prestigious win of his career: the 1986 Syracuse 200. “He gave his Syracuse trophy away to a boy who had leukemia,” McCreadie said. “This little kid had a Make-A-Wish deal and he wanted a car like my dad’s, so the guys, they built a little car and gave it to him at Rolling Wheels (Raceway Park in Elbridge, N.Y.) and he gave him the Syracuse trophy, too.”

6. McCreadie had a very familiar face in his pit stall during last weekend’s Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned Historic 100 at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells: Tommy Grecco, his crew chief with the Sweeteners Plus team from 2003-06. Grecco, a native of New York who now lives in North Carolina and oversees operations in the Longhorn Chassis shop, made the trip largely to drive the team’s hauler (McCreadie’s current chief mechanic, Scott Fegter, was dealing with an infected left eye that hindered his vision) but on Saturday he was seen working underneath McCreadie’s car and helping correct an overheating engine after heat action just like old times.

7. Gregg Satterlee of Indiana, Pa., who debuted a new Rocket Chassis at WVMS, plans to run the entire Appalachian Mountain Speedweek that starts this Friday at Clinton County Speedway in Mill Hall, Pa. Focusing on the eight-race miniseries that includes seven events in his home state means he will end a streak of entering every Dream at Eldora since 2013.

8. West Virginia’s Historic 100 weekend marked the first time I’ve crossed paths with Lucas Oil Series regular Tyler Bruening of Decorah, Iowa, and his crew chief, Zeb Holkesvik, since February’s Georgia-Florida Speedweeks, and man, I couldn’t help noticing that Holkesvik has changed his look over the past few months. The mechanic was sporting a thick, bushy mustache that made me think he was a race car driver straight out of the ‘80s. “I got sick of the beard,” said Holkesvik, who joked about styling his stache with some curls at the end.

9. I need to apologize to the hotel where I stayed in West Virginia during last weekend’s Historic 100. I absolutely destroyed a few washrags and towels when I got back to the room and cleaned up after spending the evening in the dust at the track. When the housekeepers arrived following my departure, I’m sure they knew I had been at the racetrack from the red-tinted towels I left behind.

10. While the West Virginia weekend ended on a disappointing note with a thunderstorm postponing the feature until a later date, the heavy downpour was good for one thing: it helped wash the collected dust off the haulers in the pit area. As the rain deluged the track, you could see streaks of muddy water cascading down the sides of the rigs.