KNOXVILLE, Iowa — Even winning a feature event doesn’t get Jonathan Davenport all warm and fuzzy about racing at Knoxville Raceway.

Davenport’s well-documented disdain for the famed half-mile oval on the Marion County Fairgrounds was evident Thursday after he captured the 25-lapper topping the opening preliminary night of the 20th annual Lucas Oil Late Model Knoxville Nationals. The flag-to-flag triumph and $7,000 first-place prize made him smile, but he still couldn’t bring himself to speak glowingly of the place.

Standing alongside his Double L Motorsports Longhorn Chassis during the postrace technical inspection at the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series operations trailer, the 40-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga., described the weekend as one he just has to grit his teeth and plug his way through.

“Did you hear my analogy I come up with up there?” Davenport asked, referring to his interview in victory lane. “I said, ‘You know when you go to your in-laws’ with your loved ones but you don’t really want to be there but you have to be?’ I said, ‘This is kind of like that. I don’t wanna be here, but I have to be.’ ”

It’s not like Knoxville has been a house of horrors for Davenport throughout his career; Thursday’s victory was his fourth at the track, including preliminary features in 2014 and ’15 and the crown jewel finale in ’22. He’s simply not a fan of the sprawling, lightning-fast layout that tests machinery to the max, the inside berm that he feels has grown to make the turns narrower in recent years and the Nationals format that includes inversions for the heat and feature lineups.

Davenport acknowledged that cutting back the inside berm to add width to the track might bring him around a bit on Knoxville (“Yeah, that would help,” he said), but it would only go so far for him. It’s never going to his cup of tea.

“I’m not in love with it,” Davenport said. “It’s just so hard on equipment. Like we literally went out there (for the feature) and we ran 25 laps at qualifying speed. I know the times were down a little, but it was still wide-open all the way around. Every motor out here is running 260 (and over) degrees, and we never have problems with running hot.

“I’ve brought a good car here before and got ‘em trashed, so I don’t do that. I try to bring … not a bad car, but one that I don’t really care about tearing up, one that has more laps on it, because you can tear something up so fast here and it not even be your fault. Just the way it goes.”

And he detests what he calls “the crazy-ass inverts,” a tradition at the Knoxville Nationals that he actually benefitted from on Thursday but nevertheless considered confusing. Davenport started outside the front row — the top four timers from each qualifying group that transferred through a heat were inverted with Group A drivers on the inside row and Group B on the outside — but he only realized that was the case when he reached the staging area.

Shortly before the feature field was summoned to line up, Davenport rode his motorbike over to the Lucas Oil Series trailer to check to the starting order. He saw a printed sheet outside that showed him starting seventh with Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., on the pole, so he headed back to his hauler thinking that was where he would take the green flag.

That lineup, however, was mistakenly put out without the inversion of the top-eight spots reflected.

“I didn’t know I was starting on the pole until I rolled up there (to staging) and I lined up seventh and they kept waving me up,” Davenport said. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’"

Davenport was of course pleased to learn he was sharing the front row with Chad Simpson of Mount Vernon, Iowa, but he also noted that “we pick tires and we do stuff to our car depending on where we start sometimes, and (the lineup sheet he saw) said we were starting seventh.” He said he likely would have made some different decisions if he had known he was the outside polesitter, though he also conceded, “Maybe I would’ve screwed it up. You never know.”

Whatever the case, there was no stopping Davenport in a feature slowed by only a single caution flag on lap 14. He was never seriously threatened, not even by the 27-year-old Pierce, who broke through traffic to reach second place on the race’s lone restart but had his car’s front end “take off” and get him loose when he drew even marginally close to Davenport’s wake, leaving him 1.470 seconds behind in the runner-up spot at the finish.

“Basically, it’s so much better being out front here, because it is so narrow,” Davenport said. “I mean, I had to drive so much harder when I caught lapped cars just to keep a little bit of wheelspin so I wouldn’t push.”

Davenport’s march to his 13th overall victory of 2024 — and his eighth podium finish in his last nine starts over the past month — wasn’t without some bumps in road, though. On lap 12 he nearly ran into the rear of the Boom Briggs car exiting turn four when a pack of slower cars became jumbled up by Daniel Hilsabeck of Earlham, Iowa, slowing with a flat left-rear tire, and shortly thereafter he experienced another scare.

“I think right after that (near miss in traffic) was when I had a crank trigger go out, so I thought I was blowing up,” Davenport said. “It was while I was lapping cars. I just heard it and it sounded like it was blowing up, so I was like, ‘Well, do I knock it out of gear?’ But it was a dead-miss, so I thought it could be (the crank trigger), so I switched ignitions first.

“(The switch is) on the left side (of the dashboard) with all my other ignition switches. My distributor switch is a little longer, it’s got like a little rubber thing on it so I can hit it easier. You definitely can’t see it.”

Davenport noted that he even had some trouble earlier in the night.

“And shoot, before the heat race we were getting ready to roll out and my helmet blower switch started smoking and about caught on fire,” Davenport said. “So I was about to jump out until we figured out what it was. (The smoke) was right in front of me — a wire rubbed a pop rivet and worked its way through so it was shorting out right there.”

Davenport had to run the heat without the blower operating, so with “all the other vents closed off (to the helmet) it was a little warm in there.”

The blower problem was corrected for the feature and Davenport proceeded to dominate. He didn’t, however, receive a warm reception when he emerged from his car in victory lane as the Knoxville faithful remember how he famously called the track a “dump” in an interview posted on social media after last year’s opening night of the Nationals, when he slapped the turn-four wall while leading the preliminary feature because he pushed in a lapped car’s dirty air.

“All the fans with the boos was awesome,” Davenport said with a sly smile. “Oh yeah, I got more boos than anything.”