Jonathan Davenport put together yet another masterful game-winning drive when he settled into his all-too familiar place Saturday at Eldora Speedway, leading the World 100 as the checkers neared.

The Blairsville, Ga., driver has never lost an Eldora crown jewel upon seizing control in the second half of a 100-lapper. That’s five World 100s, two Dreams, and last year’s Eldora Million — a perfect 8-0 record — when leading at the Big E from lap 50 onward.

Considering all that, Davenport was taken aback when Hudson O’Neal flipped Saturday’s script and undermined the very gameplan that had essentially never been overthrown before. Sure, Davenport has lost more races at Eldora than won. Relinquishing the lead when he thought he was in perfect position to execute a record-tying sixth time in the World 100, the feat that would’ve tied the legendary Billy Moyer, is what had been offbeat for Davenport.

“I thought I played my hand pretty good there and saved my tires,” said Davenport, who led a race-high 40 laps but lost the lead on lap 92. “Just strategically worked to the front and then took the lead when I thought I needed to there when the racetrack was changing before (Hudson) found it. Yeah, it just built that curb up and he’s really good at running that curb.”

Five Things To Know About Jonathan Davenport

Results From The 53rd World 100 at Eldora Speedway

A variable that threw a wrench in Davenport’s vaunted Eldora ways — his strategic gameplan — was the racetrack’s shift in how it needed to be attacked. For instance, the majority of Davenport’s slew of crown jewels had been sealed and delivered around the bottom half of the Tony Stewart-owned oval. There’s few drivers better in the slick than Davenport.

But throughout the week, the memo had been clear that Eldora’s top-riding, cushion-leaning characteristics weren’t dead. A well-known strength of O’Neal’s, on the other hand, is his throttle-smashing ability along the fence. The Rocket1 Racing team reminded the Dirt Late Model world of that when he upended Davenport, also up on the cushion, in the late going two weeks ago at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway for a $50,000 payday.

“I’ve won races on the cushion here before, but it’s been a while,” Davenport said. “It’s just a different racetrack. Obviously they had it wetter all week, like we was running times in the feature there that we probably qualified at when we were here before. It’s just a whole lot faster pace. We’re going to move up the track when it’s like that. Just the way it is. Just was the hand we was dealt.”

After The Checkers: Breaking Down The 53rd World 100

The only other crown jewel in Eldora history that Davenport led laps but failed to win had been the 2018 Dream when the Georgian paced laps 9-35 but fell into the clutches of Scott Bloomquist and Dale McDowell to finish third. On Saturday, however, when O’Neal grabbed hold of the cushion like the turbo button in Mario Kart, “there ain’t nothing else I could’ve done,” Davenport said.

“I could’ve moved to the curb earlier, but I didn’t know exactly how to run it because there was nobody in front of me,” Davenport said. “I would’ve probably pushed and hit the fence. Yeah, I think my guys did a great job. I think we made all the right changes. I wasn’t very good at first, but I knew my car would get betters as we went. I tried to keep my tires under me. That’s just the way it ended up.”

Davenport felt Saturday’s race played out in three different stages for him. The first half, the first 51 laps right before powering into the lead on lap 52, he bided his time, slowly moving from fourth into the second spot.

“That’s just how I played the race out,” Davenport said. “They wet the bottom, so I rode around there and didn’t get in the crumbs; tried not to kill the edges on my tires. Just let them go and keep track position at that point, try not to lose too much. I knew there would be cautions because it’d be so fast. Yeah, as you said, I just hung and made my way up to second. Took the lead then got passed again.”

Five cautions had indeed fragmented the first half of the race, which allowed Davenport to size up his go-ahead move following the lap-49 restart. Once he pulled the trigger on O’Neal, the leader of laps 15 through 51 and 92 through the checkers, the result appeared inevitable.

It’s easy to think that when the No. 49 team has made that kind of impression through the years. But things have been far from breezy for the Davenport-powered group. Davenport, though he won the Dream earlier in June, is still in the strengthening stages of building up a new-look crew. Cory Fostvedt “has really stepped up,” said Davenport, who called for a team meeting in the hours leading into the Dream in June to get the Double L Motorsports team back on the same page.

“We got there and had a big pep talk with the guys. I tried to rally like a quarterback, I guess … I tried to,” Davenport said. “We got everybody together and talked about everything that was going good and bad. Like I said, we rallied the troops there and had a good showing. We turned it around. We wasn’t that good when we started the weekend, yet we still worked on it and I felt like we can carry over some of that over.”

What Davenport’s trying to say is that he and the Double L team, void of former crew chief Jason Durham among others this season because Durham took a job with Stormy Scott to better suit he and his family, can be taken for granted by the public because extraordinary results at Eldora are now the standard. Though they are the gold standard, maintaining that status takes strenuous work, just as much as those chasing their high position.

“You can go buy the same exact car I got … same shocks, same motor, same tires, but it’s the people that work on them that make the difference,” Davenport said. “Yeah, we’ve had a lot of crew changes in the past year, but whoever I’m working with, I try to work with them as good as I can, talk to them, and we put our heads together and make the best decision as possible.”

At the end of the Saturday, Davenport wasn’t downcast nor visibly defeated: “No … these things are hard to win.”

But the rare sting of defeat was real internally to Davenport, who finished on the losing end of a late-race battle, his first runner-up in an Eldora crown jewel (minus his second-place finish to Scott Bloomquist in the 2015 Dream when Bloomquist was disqualified for being light at the scales).

“This don’t matter if you run second or 10th. You come here to win,” Davenport said. “I just needed to get a little bit better start. I didn’t get the start I needed. I want to be beside him getting into turn one. And he was just a little bit ahead of me. Just the way it went. I tried to turn down, but I didn’t know I had that much of my spoiler knocked off otherwise I would’ve railed the fence all the way around. I knew, looking at it, there’s no way I could’ve run the middle to bottom then.

“He just got up there and got a little bit more I didn’t know was there at the time and got by us. It’s just the way it went.”