A slow start. An unexpected ride change. Plenty of growing pains getting acquainted with a new team and chassis.

Tim McCreadie’s path to the final berth in the Lucas Oil Late Model Series Big River Steel Big Four playoff was anything but smooth, but a fifth-place finish in Saturday’s 75-lap Lucas Oil Late Model Knoxville Nationals at Knoxville Raceway propelled him past Hudson O’Neal for the chance to run for the national tour’s $200,000 championship.

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Suddenly, it’s a whole new season for the 50-year-old star from Watertown, N.Y., and the powerhouse Rocket Chassis house car operation.

“We’re playing with house money now,” McCreadie said while standing in the Rocket1 team’s big blue trailer after clinching a Big Four spot. “It’s really satisfying to get in, but a lot of a roller coaster to get here.”

McCreadie’s car owner, Mark Richards, acknowledged the struggle that T-Mac and the Rocket1 gang experienced to join Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., and Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, in the seven-race Lucas Oil Series playoff which will play out at five tracks over the next month.

“When Timmy got in this car, we were ninth (in the points standings),” Richards said, thinking back to the monumental mid-March moment when O’Neal departed the Rocket1 seat and was replaced by McCreadie. “We were second (in the standings after Georgia-Florida Speedweeks) when Hudson was driving, so we went from second back to ninth and worked our way back into the top four.

“We are happy. It turned out good. We worked and got there.”

McCreadie won once during Speedweeks — on Feb. 3 at All-Tech Raceway in Ellisville, Fla. — while driving for Donald and Gena Bradsher’s Paylor Motorsports, but an otherwise quiet start to 2024 saw him exit February sitting ninth in the Lucas Oil Series standings, already 90 points out of fourth place. His move to the Rocket1 team, which ended a run of four-plus years with Paylor Motorsports highlighted by back-to-back Lucas Oil Series titles in 2021-22, brought renewed optimism but didn’t super-charge an immediate climb up the points ladder as he sought to adjust to his new surroundings.

Come August, however, McCreadie seemed to find his footing driving a freshly designed Rocket XR1.2 machine. He reached fourth in the standings after a ninth-place finish in Aug. 10’s North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., and solidified his positioning there the following week with a $50,000 victory — his long-awaited first in the house car — in the Nutrien Ag Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway in Locust Grove, Ark.

But there was still one more speed bump to overcome.

“We broke a rocker arm leading the race (on Aug. 23 at Pennsylvania’s Port Royal Speedway) and that put us back again,” Richards said of a 27th-place finish that allowed O’Neal to reclaim fourth in the standings by 25 points.

McCreadie rebounded with a fifth-place finish in Port Royal’s $50,000-to-win finale to close within 15 points of O’Neal, but he nevertheless didn’t have good vibes about his fate.

“Leaving Port Royal was a little demoralizing because I really thought we had laid claim to that (fourth) spot but then we broke on a night that we might have won,” McCreadie said. “We were really fast that night.

“Then we had rainouts,” he continued, noting that he lost two opportunities to regain fourth with Labor Day weekend cancellations at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park and Tyler County Speedway in Middlebourne, W.Va. “Everything was going the wrong way for us, but everybody’s positive on this team. This deal’s a well-run machine and it’s next race up.”

Everything came down to the Knoxville Nationals, a race McCreadie won in 2008 but has continually eluded Richards’s team for two decades. With McCreadie and Martinsville, Ind.’s O’Neal — the 2023 Lucas Oil Series champion driving for Rocket1 — so close, the two drivers faced the prospect of a nerve-racking finale.

McCreadie started fourth in Saturday’s headliner after finishes of fifth and 15th in the preliminary features. O’Neal, 24, was right behind at the initial green flag in fifth following his prelim runs of third and ninth.

O’Neal jumped ahead at the start, but McCreadie overtook him for fourth on lap 10 and remained in the spot, one place ahead of O’Neal, when the race’s first caution flag flew on lap 19. The restart saw O’Neal gain the upper hand with an outside charge through turns one and two that carried him to second place behind eventual winner Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill. 

“The track was a little slimy on the outside to start, so we couldn’t take off,” McCreadie said. “I got to the bottom quickly and kind of sat there (and slipped ahead of O’Neal), but then once the outside got tacky I had a bunch of restarts on the bottom which didn’t help at all until the very last one.”

When O’Neal surged ahead, McCreadie said he “figured it would be tough because, you know, he’s in front and he’s controlling his pace. And I couldn’t beat him at that point. If he run second, we couldn’t beat him unless I won.”

O’Neal briefly slipped past Pierce for lead on lap 35 before settling back into second on the 43rd circuit. When a caution flag flew on lap 55, O’Neal was still holding second while McCreadie was well back in seventh.

Then the race — and the Big Four battle — took a dramatic turn. As McCreadie launched forward on the inside of turns one and two on the restart, O’Neal stumbled on the cushion between the corners, pushed and fell backward. At the line on lap 56, McCreadie was up to third and O’Neal had tumbled to seventh.

“I kept getting stuck on the bottom (for restarts) and it never would take off, and I went in there and man, I couldn’t have hit it any better,” McCreadie said. “Them guys kind of jammed each other up and I went from wherever I was to third. Then I got on the cushion because I was worried the bottom wouldn’t stay fast.

“And I didn’t know where Hudson was. I didn’t see him on the (score) board anymore and I knew I was third and I figured that was enough.”

O’Neal struggled repeatedly in the ensuing circuits, bouncing the left side of his SSI Motorsports Longhorn Chassis hard over the inside berm through turns one and two on lap 58 and pushing over the cushion in turn four on lap 60 when he appeared to check up behind Davenport. Seconds after the lap-60 stumble, O’Neal slowed to bring out a caution flag and headed to the pit area.

“He said there was a little hump down there and he just hit it wrong,” Anthony Burroughs, O’Neal’s crew chief, said of the restart trouble that led to O’Neal’s tumble from contention. “It kind of bounced him over the cushion. We got hit and it knocked the fender into the tire. Just racing.”

As O’Neal’s crew went to work changing both rear tires on his car — only to have officials make them put the original tires back on because by rule a driver who brings out a caution flag can’t change a tire unless it’s flat — rain that had been spitting for several laps began to fall harder. The race was red-flagged and the field was brought into the infield as officials waited to see if the precipitation would move away without the track surface being lost.

The rain did stop without deluging the track and a window before more weather was expected to arrive provided officials the opportunity to restart the race and complete the scheduled 75-lap distance after a short period of track-packing by push trucks. McCreadie and Richards weren’t thrilled with the feature’s resumption — they felt continuing following rain with the race already past the halfway point added too many variables — but fans were no doubt pleased to see the feature run to its conclusion.

Racing on provided plenty of anxiety for McCreadie, who had already been pushing his car to the limit for an extended stretch and had broken straps on his right-rear quarterpanel pulling tread blocks off the tire.

“Right when (O’Neal) passed on that (lap-19) restart, after that was as hard as I could run until the checkered came out,” McCreadie said. “I just drove as hard as I could. I got to the point where I could pretty much go in without lifting. (The car) was a little free (handling) and I knew that I was gonna hurt the tires, but what are you gonna do? I’d hate to not leave it all out there.

“(The tire wear) kind of showed after that red (flag). I was just on top of the track. I fried the tires off it, and the straps took (blocks) off the tires. Without a long delay (for the rain), it isn’t gonna matter, because everybody’s stuff’s hot and you’re beating the cushion up. But when you have a long delay, 30 minutes or whatever like that, you don’t have much tread left to run on.”

Richards knew the situation with the right-rear tire meant McCreadie was “probably gonna just hang on” for the final 15 laps, and he did. McCreadie lost a couple spots on the restart and settled into fifth, ample to snag the final playoff spot from O’Neal, who finished 15th as his hopes for a second straight tour crown came to an end.

McCreadie said he’s “had way bigger celebrations” than the relatively muted one the Rocket1 team enjoyed upon clinching the Big Four spot, but getting into the playoff gave him and Richards’s some renewed vigor.

"It was pretty cool,” McCreadie said. “I really don’t know what to say. I really feel like I should always been in the top-four of the chase. Last year we missed it, and this year changing teams … it made things harder. But now here we are.

“And I think we should be pretty competitive. We’ve showed a lot of speed the last month-and-a-half. We were consistent before, but instead of taking them sevenths and eighths and 10th, we’ve been getting the seconds and thirds and fifths and the one win.”

Richards was low-key when asked about having a shot at a second straight Lucas Oil Series title for his team and a third for his driver, but he knows McCreadie’s steady, consistent nature will keep him in the thick of a seven-race playoff and the team’s recent strength makes this a perfect time for a reset of the points. The playoff begins this weekend at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway with a $10,000-to-win show on Friday and the $50,000-to-win Jackson 100 on Saturday.

“Our car’s been good here for the past month or so,” Richards said. “Look, anything can happen in this sport. We got a chance to win a championship. Whether it’s right or not, people can say whatever, but it’s the way they set the rules up. We’ll see what happens.”