MARYVILLE, Tenn. — Moments after watching his driver Brandon Overton complete a flag-to-flag victory in Saturday’s 60-lap Mountain Moonshine Classic at Smoky Mountain Speedway, David Wells stood near the scales in the infield and breezily summed up what he had witnessed.

“Brandon’s back to his old self,” said Wells, a Kentucky native and retired coal company owner who has fielded Overton’s equipment for six seasons.

Wells, 67, spoke from his position as a proud team owner and close confidant of Overton, who calls his boss “Big Dave” and credits him with providing unwavering support personally and professionally. It’s no secret to the Dirt Late Model world that Overton, 33, of Evans, Ga., experienced a downright frustrating 2023 season while chasing the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series for the first time, and it was Wells who led the way in revitalizing his vastly talented hired gun by bankrolling an in-house chassis program and green-lighting a ’24 schedule of Overton’s choosing.

So far, so good, for Overton, whose $50,000 triumph in Saturday’s Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned event was his seventh overall of the season — just two short of his Super Late Model total last year. He’s also becoming increasingly comfortable in the Infinity Chassis being built by Wells’s son, former national touring series regular Eric Wells, at the Wells Motorsports shop in Hazard, Ky.

“He’s getting his confidence back,” Wells said of Overton. “These new cars are really fitting his style. And with the Infinity cars that we’re developing, we’re only gonna get better.”

Overton would agree with Wells. After celebrating in victory lane, he returned to his trailer in the pit area and, while leaning on a counter inside, indicated that capturing a major national show — his first since a $50,000 WoO triumph in April 2023 at Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala. — had him approaching the feeling he possessed during his halcyon 2021-22 seasons with Wells.

“We needed this,” Overton said. “We’ve been all the way on the top and we’ve been all the way to bottom again. We’re just trying to plug back up through there. It feels good to win a big race again.”

VIDEO: Highlights from the Lucas Oil Mountain Moonshine Classic at Smoky Mountain. 

No one should have been surprised by Overton’s standout performance at Smoky Mountain if they had paid attention to his comments the previous week after he piloted a brand-new Infinity machine to a third-place finish in the June 8’s 100-lap Dream XXX at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. He lost second place to Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., coming to the white flag after being the closest pursuer of flag-to-flag winner Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., most of the way, but he was absolutely beaming afterwards.

The feel Overton had at Eldora reminded him of the height of his powers when he would “kick their ass in the middle of the racetrack,” Overton said, and at Smoky Mountain, that’s largely what he did.

While Overton didn’t enter the same machine he drove at Eldora — he was behind the wheel of the second Infinity Chassis off the jig, a car that was hastily constructed in February after Overton crashed the first (then unnamed) car at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla. — what he learned in the Dream helped prime him for Smoky Mountain.

“We found some more stuff after Eldora when we bring that thing home and start dissecting it,” Overton said. “We’re like, ‘OK, we need to make this adjustment here, this adjustment there.’

“We came here and last night we were bad (a seventh-place finish in Friday’s 40-lap feature to kick off the weekend), but I kind of had a pretty good idea of where we missed it. So then I said, ‘OK, let’s go up there and draw good again today, qualify good and do good in my heat, and I did … I beat (Davenport) to the corner in our heat race” to earn the pole for the main event.

Overton understood how important a front-row start can be at Smoky Mountain, which, despite being shortened before the 2023 season to a 3/8-mile oval from a larger configuration, seems even more difficult to make passes on now in his view because “everybody’s kind of like running the same line” and cars don’t slide out of the way as much as they did on the bigger layout. He had a specific strategy for the feature as well starting on the front row alongside Ryan Gustin of Marshalltown, Iowa, also an Infinity driver.

“I wanted to get the lead, but I didn’t want to be leading because I didn’t want to burn my tires up,” Overton said. “And I knew Gustin was gonna be … he drives the hell out of it, you know, so I was like, ‘All right, just go fast enough to stay in front of Gustin.’ I kept looking up there (at the scoreboard) and (Gustin) kept staying in front of Ricky (Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz.) so I was, ‘All right, just get out front and take off and then slow down.’

“And I didn’t want to catch the lapped cars. It’s so hard to start messing with them. I mean, they don’t cut you no slack anymore either.”

Overton did run up on two battling slower machines driven by Ross Robinson of Georgetown, Del., and Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa., with three laps to go. Lurking behind him in second place was Thornton, Friday’s winner and the defending champion of Smoky Mountain’s big show who had overtaken Gustin on a lap-45 restart. Overton said the middle of the track had taken rubber, but he was still concerned that one misstep could open the door for RTJ.

“You start panicking because you know that (the lapped cars are) side-by-side, so I’m like, ‘Just don’t do anything stupid and give it to him, you know what I mean?’ ” Overton said. “I knew that at least if we’re all boxed in, it would be hard for (Thornton) to slide me, Ross, Boom and everybody, so I was just trying to back up, not get too close to ‘em getting in (the corner) so I wouldn’t get loose.

“I kind of got a little run (on Briggs approaching the white flag). I just calmed myself down getting into three and said, ‘All right, don’t fly in there with ‘em. Just stop.’ So I stopped, and then I figured if Ricky was gonna send it, he would’ve got in that air (off Overton’s car) and slid, and then I turned down and got a good run off four and I said, ‘All right, I gotta get in front of Boom.’

“You’re out there thinking the whole time we’re doing it,” Overton added. “Like, it probably looks like we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, but we’re trying to say, ‘All right, if we do this,’ because it’s just such a razor’s edge of getting over it.”

Overton beat Thornton to the finish line by 0.824 of a second, clinching a triumph that put him a good place. All the thoughts that had been bouncing around his brain — like his status as Wells’s driver if he couldn’t get back to winning with regularity — filtered away as he gained validation for himself, his 2024 schedule and his new cars.

“I feel way better, just because there’s so much stuff … it’s a mental thing more than it is racing, and it gets you so messed up in the head,” Overton said. “Look, we want to win so bad, you start trying so hard, sometimes it screws you up. 

“But that’s what I’ve told (the team) — I just wanna do what I wanna do. I wanna get back to, if we don’t go race, we don’t go race. It’s fine. I wanna get back to having fun, and I wanna race when I wanna race, and I’m gonna be fine. I just need a little more time” to find a rhythm. The struggles and checkered flag dry spells had gnawed at Overton.

“Everybody back home, they’re like, ‘Oh, man, you suck. What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Because, we won so much when we were winning all the time,” Overton said. “It’s so funny. Like at Eldora the other night, we run 10th (in Thursday’s preliminary feature), and my dad, he’s like, ‘What in the hell’s wrong with you? You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.’ He’s raising hell, right? Well, the next night Cody (Overton’s younger brother) runs and I get to watch, and he finishes whatever, 15th of whatever (actually 14th in a prelim feature), and my daddy was over there smiling, he’s like, ‘Brandon, Cody did so good, didn’t he?’ And I said, ‘What the hell? I just run 10th and you told me I suck. What the hell?’ ”

Such are the realities of sky-high expectations for a driver like Overton who has enjoyed wild success.

“What sucks about the whole racing deal is when we don’t win, then you got people who have nothing to do but, like, stir the s--- up,” Overton said. “They’re like, ‘He’s not running good. Is he gonna get fired?’ This guy’s in your ear saying, ‘You know, I heard you’re gonna get fired if you don’t win.’

“It just gets you all uneasy, so that’s why I’ve come to tell myself, ‘If you get fired, tough s---, you know what I mean? You’re gonna start over, you’re gonna do this s--- all over again, and you’re gonna be OK.’ I can’t be worried about it, and that’s how I am. I’m a worrier, so when they start talking all this crazy s--- and I hear it, I don’t say nothing, I just hold it all in. I don’t tell Big Dave, I don’t tell anybody this is what people are saying to me. I just hold it all in, so then I’m really about to explode inside.”

That pressure has resided like floodwaters after a deluge.

“It feels good,” Overton said of his $50,000 payday. “I’m sure it makes Big Dave feel good. He’s here, he had a good weekend.

“It’s great,” he continued, referring to the trajectory of his season on the Southeastern-based Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series (he’s the points leader of the tour boasting a $50,000 champion’s prize). “This is the way I like to race. This is the way I do best — when I have no pressure. If I gotta go to a Hunt the Front race, nine times out of 10, I wanna go to that track anyway. It’s at my house and it’s paying good money, I wanna go there. I love running Ray Cook’s (Schaeffer’s Spring and Southern Nationals) stuff — I can put American Racers on and go run them. And I can run the big shows that I wanna run, so we’re gonna do whatever we want to do, we’re gonna go race and have fun.”

Wells, of course, has never harbored any thoughts of breaking ties with Overton. He has his guy and just wants to put him in the best position to succeed.

“It’s never been an issue,” Wells said when asked about Overton’s worries of being fired. “He puts more pressure on himself. I tell him, ‘Hey, we’ll get it figured out.’

“He struggled last year, and these drivers are gonna get down if they’re not winning. Hopefully now we got him something where he can go back to being himself.”

Overton is ready to let the good times roll. He senses the momentum picking up not only within himself but with the fledgling Infinity cars.

“We just find stuff the more we race these cars,” said Overton, whose crew consists of full-timers Mike Burtelle (crew chief), Ryan Cantillo and Chapman Moore. “You know how it is. Eric (Wells) is new to (building cars), so he’s having to learn where stuff goes, and what’s moving, so he’s learning, he’s getting better, and each car he builds gets a little better, little better, little better. 

“Tonight was a big night, because we know this car’s fine,” he continued, before adding: “But we know we got one up top (the Eldora car in the trailer that served as his backup car for the weekend) that’s badass and that’ll outrun it. I feel good about that.”