Perhaps no victory this season on the Lucas Oil Late Model Late Model Dirt Series will mean more to a driver than Mike Marlar’s triumph of the 45th annual Jackson 100 presented by Summit Racing Equipment at Brownstown Speedway.

For the Winfield, Tenn., his first career Jackson 100 victory — in his 13th event start nonetheless — is as rewarding as they come. And the 46-year-old doesn’t need to explain himself overly much why that’s the case.

“I was thinking awhile back, it’s pretty well-documented how much I’ve been sucking this year,” said Marlar, whose Saturday victory at the quarter-mile Brownstown oval marked his first full field Lucas Oil victory since Feb. 24 at Georgia’s Golden Isles Speedway. “I don’t take anything negative out of that. I think the sport has high expectations for me. That’s not really a bad thing. It’s a bad thing if you’re not doing good. I’m happy people think I should be winning and notice when I’m off.

“Although we haven’t been living up to that standard, I’m pretty happy that we get beat up on a little bit for doing back because obviously people expect me not to do bad.”

Nearly every obstacle imaginable that a touring Dirt Late Model racer could face has been hurled at Marlar and his No. 157 Skyline Motorsports team this season, a season he’s hardly raced at full strength amid crashes, engine failures, mechanical failures, trailer fires, missed setups, and physical pain; concussions particularly.

But for once Saturday at Brownstown, a place that means a great deal to Marlar because of the connections he’s made there through the years since his first Jackson 100 start exactly 20 years ago in 2004, he finally put a weekend together that he’s all-around proud of.

“It’s big time,” Marlar said. “Aside from the history of it and all our connections up here with James (Essex) and C.J. (Rayburn) and all these fans … the Petros, I raced modifieds with Randy and Don Fleetwood. My dad (David) used to race with Don Fleetwood, Devin Gilpin’s grandpa.

“So, yeah, a lot of those guys would come down to Kentucky and race, and we would come up from Tennessee and race at the Ponderosas and Glasgows (at Barren County Speedway), and all those places. I just remember when I first got a modified seeing Randy Petro, and he was a badass back then. He didn’t know who I was, but I knew who he was, you know? So, yeah, there’s a lot of history here.”

Most notably, Marlar’s “glad I have some good news to tell Greg (Bruening).”

“I just keep bombing him with bad news all the time,” Marlar added. “I just feel so bad for him because he’s such a good guy and he’s so nice. He’s taken some hard hits this year like a champ. I’m just happy we can give him this. I want to showcase his team because he has a first-class team. I want to showcase that to the racing world that he’s going to be one of the future guys in this sport from the team owners standpoint. … Skyline has been under the radar too long.”

This past weekend at Brownstown was Marlar’s first weekend he produced back-to-back podium finishes since June 29’s runner-up at Volunteer Speedway’s 50th anniversary race and July 1’s third-place finish during XR Super Series action at Proctor (Minn.) Speedway.

At that point, Marlar had been fifth in the Lucas Oil Series standings, only 35 points behind Tim McCreadie following June 22’s Firecracker 100 at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa. Entering the 44th annual General Tire Dirt Track World Championship presented by Automotive Racing Products, Marlar’s seventh in the series standings, 245 points behind Hudson O’Neal in fifth. Considering this summer will go down as one of, if not, the most trying summer Marlar could endure as a touring driver, finishing out the year seventh in the standings isn’t that bad after all.

From the start of July through Pittsburgher weekend at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway on Oct. 4-5, Marlar mustered an average finish of 14.4 across 18 races. But even through those trials knowing “it’s hard to stay involved in a series when you aren’t winning,” Marlar never considered dropping off the Lucas Oil tour.

If anything, Marlar’s “actually” enjoyed following the series because, although the touring grind can be punishing and unforgiving at times, it’s put him to the ultimate test and has kept him motivated to right the ship.

“I don’t really know for sure what next year’s plans will be. But I will say, I do enjoy doing it and enjoy racing everybody in the series, and the series people,” Marlar said. “Everything they have going on, I do believe it’s the top-tier deal. Even though I like running around doing my own thing, I also know when I race the best guys every night, it keeps me up there, too. There’s a balance to it that hopefully we find.

“I’ve had a good time with it. It’s been a tough year for other reasons, but not because we’re on the series. The series has a lot of great people who run it. Rick, I think, has really grown with his role. He’s making some really good decisions long-term for the sport. I appreciate what he’s doing.”

Marlar’s breakthrough weekend, if it deserves to be called, has been building these last few weeks rather being lightning in a bottle. He finished 10th and 18th at the Pittsburgher, but truly believed he found better balance in his race cars despite “just missing it in the feature.”

“I got the car way too loose in the feature and paid a heavy price for it,” Marlar said his 18th-place run at the Pittsburgher on Oct. 5. “But yeah, when you get it right, you can win, obviously. It’s very technical now.”

He then tested at Wartburg (Tenn.) Speedway earlier this week and “verified some things.”

“A lot of this sport is confidence in what you’re doing because there’s so many other variables,” Marlar said. “You can have a good car, and let’s just say you get out there on a bad time with the speed of the track, you can end up in the second or third row of the heat and because of nothing but track condition, you know? We wanted to go do some testing to confirm some of the things we had success with was still working. We found a good happy-medium with the car there.”

It may come as a surprise, but the car Marlar won with at Brownstown and made headway with during the Pittsburgher weekend is a car that has many races on it this year, including the bulk of Georgia-Florida Speedweeks and Aug. 8’s crash on opening night of the North-South 100 at Kentucky’s Florence Speedway.

Despite baseless internet rumors that he’d be changing chassis because he sold a pair of race cars last month, Marlar has been preparing his new fleet of Longhorns for the 2025 season “so we can get a head start for next year” and “take a little time off this winter.”

“We’ve been working on that project,” Marlar said. “This car right here is the car I crashed really hard at Florence. Longhorn’s done a good job preparing it for me because it’s as good as it’s ever been, you know?”

Marlar also continues to be one of the more outspoken drivers when it comes to the challenges of Dirt Late Model racing’s stringent rule book at the national touring level.

“There’s so many rules that come out of tech over there,” Marlar said. “They measured a hundred things. There’s so many rules and we’re in such a tight box that all you can really work on are the shocks and springs, and bar angles and a few things. We’re down to qualifying within a tenth of a second, which puts you off the front row now. We’re working for tenths now. It used to be when you picked up a half-second, that was something cool and you were the man. Now, that doesn’t happen. You go for tenths of seconds.”

But Marlar’s veteran skillset is what truly lifted him to victory on Saturday. Before the Jackson 100 feature, he kept telling himself and his team that he didn’t want the early lead from the outside front row.

“Sometimes I have the tendency to carry a place that’s a little faster than I should,” Marlar said. “I just thought, honestly, I don’t care if I get the lead. I need to make sure I have tires at the end of the race.

Marlar remembers last year’s Jackson 100 when he suffered a flat tire battling Ricky Thornton Jr. for the lead. He didn’t want that to happen again, of course.

“When I got back in the trailer, I realized this tire was so wore out and chunked out,” Marlar said of his flat tire from the 2023 Jackson 100. "I miss-abused it and over-abused it to the point where I wasn’t going to have a good finish anyway. I realized then, tonight, I didn’t need to do that again.

“Even when I got the lead (the opening five laps), I was screwing around there, driving about 70 percent. I didn’t think anybody can pass me. When (Bobby Pierce) passed me, I was like, ‘Holy s—, that isn’t good.’ But I knew I had a really good car.”

Marlar stuck with Pierce and hounded the winningest Dirt Late Model driver in the country every step of the way until he regained control on lap 48. Those 43 laps chasing Pierce revealed just how good of a car he had.

“When I got open track after that restart, I took off,” Marlar said of the lap-42 restart. “I knew at that point in the race, it was time to be in the lead, if you could be. I was hustling pretty hard to get the lead back. Then when I did, I calmed down and ran my race.”

Marlar smiled when asked if there’s anything he’d like to add from this weekend and rounded the question out with a simple statement.

“Just thankful,” Marlar said, “and happy.”