ROSSBURG, Ohio — The eye test seemed to indicate that a high-riding Brandon Sheppard just might have the speed to pull off a victory in Friday’s 50-lap Dirt Late Model Dream XXX preliminary feature at Eldora Speedway.

Reality, though, was different. B-Shepp just couldn’t rip that fine line around the very top of the high-banked, half-mile oval with enough consistency to carry him all the way to the front of a race won in flag-to-flag fashion by Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio.

How many times could the 31-year-old star from New Berlin, Ill., hit a perfect lap? Not nearly often enough.

“Half. Maybe half (the time),” Sheppard said while signing autographs and talking to fans following his third-place finish. “There was a few laps where I was like, ‘Oh, that was good!’ And then you just couldn’t do it again.

“Down there (in turns three and four) you could hit it about every lap. Down here (in one and two), you couldn’t.”

Sheppard started seventh and perched his Longhorn Chassis factory team car on the track’s thin cushion early in the race. He soon began making time by slinging his machine through the corners, cracking the top five on lap seven and climbing all the way up to second place on lap 37.

But Sheppard spent only two circuits in the runner-up spot after overtaking Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga., who regained the position and stayed there to the finish.

“I think (the cushion) was thinner today than what it was yesterday, especially in one and two, so it was bound to knock the (rear) deck out (from slapping the outside wall),” Sheppard said. “And then once we did that (after the halfway point) we struggled a little bit on the middle-bottom, but I could still roll around there pretty good.

“I thought Dale was leading for a while. Devin was gone. Then there off that restart (on lap 21) I thought I could hang with (Moran), but then I was racing with J.D. (fifth-place finisher Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga.) and Dale there and Devin got away from us.

“About the last 15, 20 laps, I knew that the middle-bottom was starting to clean up or something,” he added. “I was slowing down up top and they were speeding up on the bottom. And if I tried to go down on the track, I think I was slowed up a little bit (by his car’s rear deck damage).”

Sheppard raced on a ragged edge throughout the race, his engine roaring at high RPM as he wrestled his No. B5 just inches from Eldora’s concrete. 

“Oh, you’re scraping (the wall), especially right there in the middle (of the corners),” Sheppard said. “From the middle off there’s nothing (to lean on), so you kind of gotta get against it in the middle and then try to arc off of it. You just gotta tell yourself once you get the car loaded, stay on the gas. Don’t lift. When you lift, you immediately lose it.

“This is gonna sound crazy, but you’re going too fast for the track, if that makes any sense. You’re going way too fast against the cushion to go down to the middle and run that same speed, so whenever you hit that slick … like if I try to run the top off of (turn two), and I try to run wide open and enter that middle (in turn three), I’m pushing across the track because I’m going too fast for the track. Now if I whoa up and back my corner up, then I can do what I need to do.”

Running so precariously close to the wall, however, didn’t faze last October’s Dirt Track World Championship victory at Eldora.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” he said. “If you’re in the middle (of the track) and then you hit the wall, then it’s bad. But if you’re right next to it, it don’t hurt that bad.”

After a rough-and-tumble heat race during which he “felt like a ping-pong ball” while salvaging a fourth-place finish, Sheppard was satisfied with his preliminary feature performance. When asked if he could contend for his second career Dream triumph, he responded positively.

“I hope so,” said Sheppard, who has started the Dream finale nine times since 2012 with his results topped by his 2019 victory and a second-place finish in ’17. “But we gotta get in there (the feature field) first. We’ll see what happens.”