IMPERIAL, Pa. — Jonathan Davenport had pledged that he wouldn’t do it. No way was he ever again going to take his Double L Motorsports Longhorn Chassis he affectionately calls Eldora anywhere but the famed half-mile oval in Rossburg, Ohio, the only place he’s raced the machine since the fall of 2021.

But there he was on Saturday night, standing on his most cherished car’s roof in his trademark triumphant pose after dominating from flag-to-flag to capture the 75-lap finale of the 36th Pittsburgher 100 weekend — and a race-record $50,000 top prize — at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway. 

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What made the 40-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga., change his mind about entering the car in an event somewhere other than Eldora Speedway for the first time since August 2021 at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway? Some deep thoughts about the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series’s five-race Big River Steel Chase for the Championship as he was outside on his ranch in Pelzer, S.C.

With Davenport facing a Big Four battle for the national tour’s title with Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., and Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., over a short stretch, he wanted to make sure he brought his best bullet to the opening doubleheader.

“While I was cleaning up the mess at my house from that storm (last week’s Hurricane Helene), I’m weed-eating or mowing or blowing the driveway off or picking up sticks … I had a lot of time by myself, AirPods in and just thinking,” Davenport said after climbing out of his car during postrace inspection area in the temporary pit area outside PPMS’s backstretch. “I’m like, ‘If you leave here and not have a good weekend, you’re done basically.’ There’s no time to catch up” with only three more points races.

VIDEO: Watch highlights from Saturday's Pittsburgher at PPMS. 

Davenport certainly didn’t relish the prospect of running his 2021-vintage car away from Eldora — especially with the track hosting the Lucas Oil Series’s Chase-ending $100,000-to-win Dirt Track World Championship Oct. 18-19 — but he felt the sprawling, half-mile PPMS was a track worth the risk.

“So I just know this place, you got to be able to steer really well,” Davenport said. “That’s the biggest thing — if you can’t steer here, then you keep freeing your car up and can never get off the corner. It’s just a bad deal. I’ve been here like that before.

“This car just steers so good. I’m very confident in this car. I know the changes it needs. And we’re put 120 percent effort into winning this championship, so I thought, Why not bring our best piece here? I’m always nervous about tearing it up, because I love Eldora and that’s the place I can make money, but I feel like this 200-grand for this championship will mean a lot also.

“And normally you don’t get tore up here unless something crazy happens,” he added. “I mean, if you wreck here, you destroy a car, not just bend a fender, but it’s wide enough you can get out of trouble most of the time. It ain’t gonna be really rough, the racetrack ain’t gonna tear the car up. It’s really big and it’s fast, but it’s still so technical here.”

Davenport had this revelation Monday. He immediately called his car owner Lance Landers and crew chief Cory Fostvedt to discuss the possibility.

“Cory’s like, ‘Well, I kind of thought about it, but I didn’t even think that was an option,’ ” Davenport said with a laugh.

Fosvedt confirmed his initial reaction to Davenport’s idea.

“He said, ‘Hey, what do you think about racing the Eldora car?’” Fosvedt recalled. “I said, ‘Well hell yeah, but I didn’t think that car was on the table so I didn’t even bring it up.’ I’m like, ‘You ain’t gotta talk me into it.’

“So we started making phone calls and getting it all lined up.”

The Eldora car was already “probably 90 percent ready,” Fosvedt said, because he’d been working on it whenever he had a spare moment since last month when Davenport drove it to a pair of semifeature wins and a third-place finish in the World 100 at Eldora. But it was sitting in the team’s shop in Batesville, Ark., while Fosvedt and his two Double L crewmen, Zach Houston and Tyler Phelps, were far away — Fosvedt at Longhorn Chassis headquarters in China Grove, N.C., and Houston and Phelps with the hauler at fellow racer Mason Zeigler’s shop in Uniontown, Pa.

As a result, “it was a lot of logistics and stuff” to make the arrangements necessary for Davenport to race the car at PPMS.

“After Wednesday (Sept. 25) when we raced at Brownstown (the Indiana track’s Castrol FloRacing Night in America event) and then they canceled (the weekend’s Jackson 100), I drove all this stuff up here to Mason Zeigler’s,” Fosvedt said, noting that Zeigler is a close friend of Davenport (and Zeigler’s crew chief, Bryan Liverman, is a former Davenport crewman) and opens his shop to Davenport’s team when they’re in the area. “On the way up here, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna sit at Mason’s for a week when all I have to do is two days worth of work.’ I’m like, ‘Man, I got that (new) car down there (at Longhorn) I really need to get working on (to assemble).’

“So I left the truck and Tyler and Zach here (in Pennsylvania) just so they could maintenance the car from Brownstown, work on tires and get ahead, and I flew back to Batesville, got a pickup truck and trailer, loaded up all the parts that I needed to put that car together, drove from Batesville to Longhorn and got there Saturday night.”

Fosvedt’s roughly 11-hour trek from Batesville to Longhorn was made a bit longer because he had to take a southern route through Atlanta with I-40 closed in western North Carolina because of damage from Hurricane Helene. At one point he found himself stuck in accident-related traffic, which prompted him to back up his truck and open trailer about a quarter-mile so he could exit the highway for an alternate route.

After arriving at Longhorn, Fosvedt unsuccessfully attempted to find a hotel room somewhere in North Carolina — vacancies were almost impossible to come by because so many people had evacuated during the storm — so he ended up sleeping in Longhorn co-owner Steve Arpin’s hauler parked outside the shop. 

Fosvedt completed the new car by Tuesday. He proceeded to load it on the team’s open trailer and drive to Elizabethtown, Ky., where on Wednesday afternoon he met Landers’s son Gavin, who was scheduled to bring the Eldora car to the DTWC on another open trailer (the team wasn’t planning to return to their shop until after the Eldora weekend). After swapping the new car for the Eldora mount, Fosvedt headed off for Zeigler’s shop to reunite with his crew and make final preparations for PPMS.

Leaving one of the two cars already in their trailer at Zeigler’s garage, Fosvedt and Co. unloaded an unexpected entry in PPMS’s pit area on Friday. It put Davenport in the right frame of mind.

“It ain’t like this car’s any better my other cars,” Davenport said. “I just really trust this car. It’s like putting on a favorite pair of shoes.”

The car nearly carried Davenport to victory in Friday’s $10,000-to-win program, but he settled for a runner-up finish to Moran in the 30-lap feature. He wasn’t able to overcome a fourth-place starting spot — where he was relegated after being nipped in qualifying by Thornton — as the polesitter led the entire distance.

“Three-hundredths (of a second), that’s what Ricky beat me by,” Davenport said. “I feel like if we could’ve got that one other row (farther forward in the feature) it could’ve worked out, but Devin did a really good job. We always like to say what-ifs, but it definitely would’ve been a lot easier anyway.”

Davenport’s trajectory in Saturday’s finale was more to his liking. He timed second-fastest in his group again, but it was to Zeigler, not a Big Four rival, and he made the right move to at the start of his heat to win it and earn the pole position for the headliner.

Then Davenport controlled the 70-lapper from start-to-finish, never facing a serious challenge. But while he built as much as a seven-second edge during the A-main’s first half, he wasn’t quite as superior following the lone caution flag on lap 42 and he was actually just holding on over the final circuits.

“That restart really made me nervous because I didn’t know where to go,” Davenport said. “We’d really just been pacing around the bottom there. I felt like I was making good ground through the lapped cars, but that’s not the car behind you, you know what I mean? That’s not a front-running car, so I thought after our tires would cool down, I thought (the optimal lane) would be more the middle to the top, so I kind of floated into turn one kind of high-middle and turned back across to try and block some air. Cory showed me I pulled away a little bit so I just kind of kept migrating back to the bottom a little bit.

“I never did really feel into the racetrack like I needed to run a big momentum line. When your tires die you pretty much just slow up and you go to a small circle, and that’s pretty much the way the track raced tonight. That’s not usually the way it races here.”

Davenport experienced some anxious moments as the checkered flag neared. His car was lagging and Moran was making a late bid after starting 12th, reaching second by lap 37, falling to fifth on the lap-42 restart and then returning to the runner-up spot with a pass of McCreadie on lap 56.

“I don’t know, but I was struggling the last 10 laps really, really bad,” Davenport said. “I caught them lapped cars … like, I passed Garrett Alberson, and then I caught Cody Overton, and then Cody changed his line and messed me up a little bit and Garrett got by. I’m like, ‘Dang,’ so I tried to calm down and get my tires back under me, and then I got back by Garrett and got back to Cody and then Cody just drove off. He moved up above Drake Troutman and drove away from him and I couldn’t go anywhere. 

“I was chattering the right-front tire if I drove really straight, or if I got a little crooked I would just hang, so I was just praying for the laps to run out. When I seen (the flagger) give two to go, I was like, ‘Holy cow!’ I kept looking at Cory to see if I still had a good enough lead (on Moran). He went to a half a straightaway where I had a straightway lead, so that means he was closing. I was just hoping he wasn’t closing fast enough.”

Davenport held on to beat Moran by 1.864 seconds, clinching his first-ever victory not only at PPMS but also in the long-running Pittsburgher. He had entered the Pittsburgher seven previous times since 2015 and came close to winning three times.

“I ran out of gas once,” Davenport said, recalling the 2019 event when his fuel tank ran dry after he led the first 93 circuits of the 100-lap feature and Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., emerged triumphant. “I got passed once or twice (by the late Scott Bloomquist late in the 2015 race and Thornton with four laps to go last year). Just never could finish it off. That’s what I was thinking those last 10 laps when I got behind Cody and them. I’m like, ‘Man, don’t lose like this,’ but we pulled it off.”

‘Ol Eldora helped him snap his PPMS jinx. It also positioned him well in the Big Four championship battle, though he ended the weekend 10 points behind Moran in the standings even though they both recorded a win and a runner-up finish.

The difference? Moran’s 10-point bonus for earning a group fast-time honor on Friday — a fact that wasn’t lost on Davenport. (Thornton trails Moran by 60 points and McCreadie is fourth 80 points in arrears.) He’s well aware that the title will be determined by tiny margins, which is why he’s turning up his level of aggressiveness to grab every position he can (as evidenced by his power move inside Zeigler through turns three and four to seize the lead in his heat).

“Last night I qualified second and finished second and I was 30 points behind Devin and I was tied with Ricky (who also earned a 10-point fast-time bonus), and McCreadie finished eighth and he wasn’t but 40 behind me, so that fast time means a lot,” Davenport said. “It was kind of disheartening tonight with the number we drawed — a ’1’ and you never wanna do that — but Mason set fast time and he went out right behind me. I just missed on the set up or that would’ve been 10 more points there. That could be really crucial when there’s only four or five races.”

Brownstown’s Jackson 100 doubleheader Friday and Saturday is next on Davenport’s agenda with $10,000- and $50,000-to-win points races. The event was rescheduled in place of the $50,000-to-win Grand Finale at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., which had its weekend nixed because of saturated grounds from Hurricane Helene and more forecast rain.

Calling Brownstown “a crapshoot for me” — and noting there “ain’t no way in hell” he’ll run his Eldora car there — Davenport said he would’ve preferred to race at East Bay. But the quarter-mile bullring in the Hoosier State is where the tour is headed so he must gear up for it if he expects to claim his fourth career Lucas Oil Series title after the checkered flag falls on Eldora’s DTWC.

“We’ve been really good at Brownstown and we’ve been really bad,” said Davenport, whose lone Jackson 100 victory came in 2015. “Heck, we was leading last week at Brownstown (in the Castrol event before fading to an eighth-place finish). We feel like we know why we backed up so much. That gives us a little bit of confidence because we did start out the night good there.

“But hell, we might do that again. And the time before that (March 23’s Lucas Oil event) we finished 15th and that was really our worst finish all year, and that’s the best we could do. There wasn’t really nothing wrong. Hopefully we don’t do that again.”

The bottom line on the playoffs according to Davenport: “We just gotta be perfect every night.”