ROSSBURG, Ohio — Carson Ferguson is thrilled to have finished sixth in Wednesday's Castrol FloRacing Night in America event at Eldora Speedway, in contention among the sport’s frontrunners Jonathan Davenport, Devin Moran, Ricky Thornton Jr., Hudson O'Neal and Bobby Pierce.

But is the Lincolnton, N.C., driver entirely at peace with sixth? What he learned during the 50-lap, $20,000-to-win feature dominated by Jonathan Davenport opened his eyes to what his 23-year-old self needs to reach the next level. 

“The biggest thing we’ve learned is how to race, just the aggressiveness, the full-time aggressiveness,” Ferguson said. “At home, the restarts might be aggressive. But here, you’ll get in the zone and somebody will come sliding across your nose six laps later, and it’s like you have to be on offense with these guys. There’s no lagging back.”

Ferguson’s highlight of the night, when he ran inside the top-five from laps 15-24, also produced his most teachable moment. Running fifth, Ferguson thought he could settle in as the half-mile built up rubber and ease his way to the finish. Then Pierce pressured Ferguson.

“Bobby showed me his nose and I came up (a groove) because I thought he came from the top a corner before," Ferguson said. "So the next lap, I moved up and he drove right around me. It was starting to latch up through the middle. I felt it before, but I didn’t think you could get a run like what Bobby did to me.

“I didn’t feel like I messed up a lot. I must’ve done something to stall my speed. … I definitely got comfortable with where I was at. I didn’t want to search around and lose speed because we were behind Hudson there a little bit. Like I said, I heard Bobby and saw him on my inside, so I moved up the next lap thinking that’s where he came from. I just guessed wrong. But he was really good.”

Overall, Ferguson chalks Wednesday up as a success for his No. 93 Paylor Motorsports entry. Ferguson’s hope for this week’s World 100 is that he can show just how much he’s grown from racing on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series as a full-time touring driver after March's promotion to the team's No. 1 driver with Tim McCreadie's exit for the Rocket Chassis house car.

Because the young driver has often faced tracks he's never seen before on the Lucas Oil Series, returning to the legendary half-mile for his fifth Eldora crown jewel attempt provides at least a bit of familiarity.

“The biggest thing is filling your notebook up,” said Ferguson, a two-time champion on Ray Cook's Schaeffer's Spring Nationals tour. “Right now, we’re filling it up with things not to do. Eventually, you’ll fill it up with things to do once we go back to tracks more than once. At home, we got decent. Last year at the Ray Cook tracks, going to those tracks the second and third time, that really showed. This year we’d have good runs sometimes. 

“I wish I could get closer on setup when we go to a new place than we’d have been. Overall, I’m happy with the way we’ve progressed through the night. Every time I come in, I feel like we have a direction of what we should’ve done instead of being clueless. I put that in the notebook as well.”

Ferguson’s solid sixth-place outing heading into the sport's most prestigious event isn't an outlier. He’s been running well, including Sunday’s runner-up finish in the Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series Baltes Classic at Eldora among 65 entries. Wednesday is also Ferguson’s sixth top-10 finish over his last 10 races since the start of August. He attributes the consistency to taking a simpler approach with nightly adjustments.

“In the beginning of the year, when we first got on the full-time national deal, when you get prepared for races after your heat race, you’re thinking of the winning adjustments. Like, what can I do to win this race and have the perfect car?” Ferguson said. “But then we had to start looking at it different. If we’re not too bad in the heat race, we make little changes or barely touch the car to maintain a good starting spot.

“Instead of adjusting the car (looking) to win the race, we’d adjust it looking to finish top-10, which we’ve migrated to the top-10 here recently. Once we can do that, you migrate to top-fives, and then hopefully run up front more.”

On Wednesday, Ferguson felt his best when he drove from the 11th-starting spot to fifth within 15 laps. But as the feature wore on, he “got tight once it rubbered it up” and couldn’t do much from there.

“We had a really good car for us to finish sixth,” Ferguson said. “I couldn’t imagine how good the top-five are. I was really happy with it.”

Ferguson’s was especially pleased to overcome qualifying 15th of 41 drivers in his time-trial group. He made up for the deficit in the second heat where he drove from fifth to finish second, comfortably inside a top-three transfer spot. 

This week for Ferguson is all about minimizing his mistakes. This is his third trip to the World now, and he’s hoping to qualify for Saturday’s main event for the first time.

“I always feel like I have bad luck when it comes to the World,” Ferguson said. “I haven’t made one yet.”

In 2022, mechanical issues on preliminary hampered his rookie showing where he started 12th in Saturday’s heat race and then fell far short of a transfer, 11th in the second consolation. Last September, Ferguson started seventh in his Saturday heat race, but a hard wreck that drew the red flag on the third lap destroyed his race car and World 100 hopes.

“We just haven’t had a lot of luck in this event,” Ferguson said. “But in the Dream, we’ve had a lot of things go our way. This place, it goes all the way down to a pill to qualify. Everything has to be perfect.”

“I think a lot of it is I don’t think I’m one of the guys people look at to be one of the guys to be in contention, which right now in my career, it’s good and bad,” Ferguson added. “You want to be looked at as a threat to win. But at the same time, it keeps you low-key, I guess. If you have a bad night, not a lot of people notice. When you have a good night, a lot of people notice. I think that goes for us in a positive way.”

In last year's Dream, Eldora's major spring event, he finished 12th, one year after finishing 16th. In this year's event, Ferguson failed to make the feature lineup, finishing seventh in one of Saturday’s consolations.

Each time he races Eldora, is eyes are opened all the more to how hard he must continue to push himself.

“The constant offensive way you have to drive is definitely changing,” Ferguson said. ““I grew up watching (Chris) Madden and (Dale) McDowell and (Brandon) Overton, how they drove real straight and smooth, always backing their corners up and everything. All of a sudden, that’s not the way you need to drive anymore. You have to drive 100 percent every lap. That’s the biggest thing.”

But as Ferguson says, pushing himself all the more is starting to become worth it.

“It takes a lot of time and money on everybody’s part,” Ferguson said. “I never went to a high school football game. I missed out on a lot of friend’s birthday parties, always going tracks and stuff growing up as a kid. Now it’s paid off in my eyes. I just have to keep grinding to get to the top of this sport.”