The biggest pavement short track event on the west coast is just days away as Washington’s Evergreen Speedway gets ready to host this year’s edition of the annual Summer Showdown, a 200-lap race for the best Super Late Model drivers the Pacific Northwest has to offer. Nearly 30 teams have already filed pre-entries for this year’s race, which will pay $25,000 to the winner.

This year’s event will be the 11th time the Summer Showdown has been contested on the large 5/8-mile oval in Monroe, Washington. Nearly half of the previous 10 races have been won by one driver, Colorado’s Preston Peltier. Peltier headlines every entry list he’s on out west, because no driver has been more dominant in the last decade than him.

Peltier has four victories in the Summer Showdown, the most recent of which came last year. Peltier’s other three victories all came consecutively from 2017-2019. Peltier has won four of the last five Summer Showdowns. And the thing is, Peltier doesn’t just win the race. He absolutely dominates it. In all four victories, Peltier has led at least half of the 200 laps. The least amount of laps he’s led came in 2019 when he led 127 circuits. His other three victories have seen laps-led totals of 173, 167, and 164. Peltier is an absolute machine in this race at this race track.

Peltier’s dominance doesn’t leave much room for other former winners of the Summer Showdown on the entry list. In fact, including Peltier, there’s just three previous winners of the Summer Showdown entered for this year’s race, and those other two winners just happen to come from the same household.

We’re talking of course about the Riddle brothers from Naches, Washington: Owen and Tayler Riddle. 

Aside from Peltier, Owen Riddle has been one of the most dominant racers in the region as well. Owen Riddle has won nearly every prestigious race in the region with the exception of one, the Idaho 200 at Stateline Speedway. Riddle has three victories in the Apple Cup at Yakima Speedway, one win at Tucson Speedway’s Chilly Willy, victories at Evergreen in the Mark Galloway Shootout as well as the 2021 Summer Showdown, and three triumphs in the Montana 200 back when it was still held at the Montana Raceway Park in Kalispell before the track closed in 2020. 

Tayler Riddle, the younger of the two brothers, has been almost as successful in recent years as his older brother. Tayler Riddle has a victory in Tucson’s Chilly Willy, as well as the Mark Galloway Shootout at Evergreen, and his biggest win to date, the 2016 Summer Showdown at Evergreen. 

There’s also a couple of big name veterans on the entry list that are surprisingly still searching for their first Summer Showdown victories. 

The first driver we’ll spotlight here is Snohomish, Washington’s Naima Lang. Lang is a multi-time track champion at Evergreen, but surprisingly his best finish in the Summer Showdown was a fourth-place effort in 2014. Lang amazingly has just three top-10 finishes in the event, a fifth in 2012, the fourth-place run in 2014, and a sixth-place result in 2017.

That brings us to Garrett Evans, one of the most well-known racers to come out of the Pacific Northwest. The veteran from Ardenvoir, Washington has five victories in the Aplle Cup, two wins in the Idaho 200, a win in both the Mark Galloway Shootout at Evergreen and the Montana 200 at Montana Raceway Park. He has 49 victories in the old NASCAR Northwest Series. You name it and he’s been there to race it, and there’s a good chance he’s won it. But one race that has eluded him is the Summer Showdown. Out of his eight starts, Evans has scored three top-five finishes, all of which were runner-up results in 2014, 2015, and 2019. The veteran finished 10th, two laps down a year ago, but maybe this is finally his year.

Other notables on the entry list include Texas driver Chris Davidson, rising star Haeden Plybon and former Kulwicki Driver Development Program finalist Kole Raz. 

Race fans can watch the 11th running of the Summer Showdown at Evergreen Speedway live on FloRacing with a FloRacing subscription. Fans can become a subscriber by clicking here.

2023 Summer Showdown Entry List