The stakes appear a little higher as the years forge on at Eldora Speedway for Jonathan Davenport. For instance, his last appearance at the legendary Rossburg, Ohio, half-mile saw the Blairsville, Ga., superstar within reach of tying Billy Moyer’s record six World 100 titles.

The 40-year-old ended up losing the lead for good on lap 62 of 100, and the would-be monumental feat vaporized. But the point is that Davenport’s seemingly on the cusp of something historic every time he returns to the Big E.

This weekend’s 44th annual General Tire Dirt Track World Championship presented by ARP is no different. Trailing season-long Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series leader Ricky Thornton Jr. by 50 points in the Big River Steel Chase for the Championship at his beloved Eldora, the sense is Davenport’s primed to overcome the deficit and hoist his fourth Lucas Oil title.

And Davenport won’t lie, he’ll be keeping a close eye on the points up through Saturday’s 100-lap, $100,000-to-win Lucas Oil season finale.

"When it gets down to the race, maybe I'll do a little math,” Davenport said after Saturday’s fifth-place finish in the Jackson 100 at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway. “But we're going to go try to win fast time and try to win the race. As I was telling them guys (his Double L Motorsports crew), it's been a long time since I went Eldora and tried to set fast time. It'll be a little different.

“But we're just going to go, and we know we have a really good hot rod for there. We got really good notes. We're going to go in there guns blazing, and the way the cards fall is the way they fall.”

In all his trips to Eldora Speedway, Davenport has secured fast-time honors twice — the 2013 and ’17 Dreams — which is insignificant compared to his 10 career major victories at the Earl Baltes-founded venue: Five World 100s, three Dreams, the 2022 Eldora Million and 2020’s 67-lap, $50,000-to-win Intercontinental Classic, which replaced that year’s World 100 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With the infamous inverts often seen at the Dream and World 100 over the years, Davenport hasn’t necessarily had to focus on his qualifying packages at Eldora. But this weekend, considering the DTWC follows the traditional Lucas Oil format, time trials are crucial.

Even if Davenport can’t overcome the 50-point lead — because if Thornton finishes fourth or better, the title is his no matter what — winning the DTWC, a crown jewel that’s long eluded him, would still very much satisfy him. For Davenport, the DTWC is “one of two (major victories) I have to check off” before he retires. The Firecracker 100 at Pennsylvania’s Lernerville Speedway would be the other.

“I got one of them at Pittsburgh (the Pittsburgh 100 at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway on Oct. 5), so that leaves me two on my list that I really want to get before I have to hang it up. I feel like we have a really good shot going in. Like I said, we’re going to go in there focused on winning the Dirt Track World Championship, and the points is what they are.”

After Oct. 4-5’s runner-up and victory during Pittsburgher weekend that left him 10 points behind Devin Moran, tricky quarter-mile Brownstown sapped a little bit of wind from Davenport’s sails.

He started third both Friday and Saturday, but could only manage ninth- and fifth-place finishes. Factor in Thornton’s victory Friday and runner-up Saturday, and that explains how Thornton made up 110 points on Davenport in just two nights.

“I feel like it’s different every time I come (to Brownstown),” Davenport said. “If I run good, I’ll come back the same way and I can’t even line up. If I run bad, and I change a little bit, then I run good. I don’t know. This place changes a lot. It’s different. It’s what makes it fun and very frustrating also.”

Davenport had been ahead of Thornton at one point Saturday, until the lap-42 caution. On that ensuing restart, he “just didn’t get a good start” and “was just free, so when I got pinned on the bottom, I couldn’t make a big circle and that let Ricky by me” in the battle for third. Davenport then “got to searching around,” where Tim McCreadie shuffled him back to fifth, “and that’s basically where we rode at.”

If Davenport played defense at Brownstown in a damage-controlling effort, then he’ll be heavy on the offensive attack at Eldora, especially with his well-known, ascribed race machine at the legendary half-mile dubbed Eldora.

Davenport has entered every marquee event at Eldora in the same car since fall of 2021 and has only taken the car outside the Tony Stewart-owned racetrack once — Oct. 4-5’s Pittsburgher at PPMS where he won the $50,000 finale — since then.

The car’s track record is remarkable — 12 victories, 27 top-five and 30 top-10 finishes in 32 feature starts — and it’s taken Davenport to five of his 10 career Eldora major victories: Two Dreams (2023, ’24), two World 100s (’21, ’22), the Eldora Million (’22).

And the car’s been so much of a talking point that Davenport’s former crew chief Jason Durham, who’s now started his own chassis enterprise, Category 5 Race Cars, is fascinated by its ever-growing legacy particularly because in 2021 he assembled every component that remains on the car today.

“J.D. and I still talk all the time,” Durham said Saturday at Brownstown. “Actually, we were talking the other day. It’s the same car that I did. The same motor we’ve always run it. Everything’s the same in that car since 2021. Yeah, I know where he is, but in a nutshell, J.D. loves that place. He has a knack for it. He knows where to be on the racetrack. And that’s just from seat time. These other guys are kind of green to that.”

Last October’s DTWC at Eldora marks Davenport’s lone DNF in 32 starts aboard his Eldora-tailored race machine. Davenport led laps 1-6 in the one-race playoff for the Lucas Oil title that also included eventual champion Hudson O’Neal, Ricky Thornton Jr. and Devin Moran. But then he backed down his pace on a rough track surface and settled into fifth before a thick clod of mud punched a hole in the radiator and eliminated him from contention.

In Kevin Kovac’s Inside Dirt Late Model Racing column published on DirtonDirt.com following Davenport’s Dream victory in June, the Georgia driver noted that “this car’s built a little different from the new (Longhorn) cars,” saying “it don’t have as much (ground) clearance as the new car does, and that’s the reason we kept packing the radiator full of mud.”

“Every time we went on the racetrack that weekend we had to put a radiator in it,” Davenport said in Kovac’s story from June. “It just bottoms out more and peels more dirt up … but that weekend (the surface) was a little different for Eldora.”

This weekend’s weather for the DTWC looks far better than last year’s with no real threat of precipitation and a high of 69 degrees around on-track activity time Saturday. The Double L Motorsports team also “made some stuff” to put on the undercarriage of their Eldora race car to better protect the radiator.

Durham could see Davenport’s current Eldora car carrying the load for Double L Motorsports team well into 2029, if all goes right and if Davenport chooses to stick around in Dirt Late Model racing that long.

“That car, barring nothing happens to it, it could be good for the next five to 10 years, just if you run it at Eldora,” Durham said.

“That car is good. It steers well. It circles good. That’s what you have to have there,” Durham added before pointing his words back to Davenport’s sheer excellence at Eldora. “But I don’t take nothing away from him. You got to be good there as a driver. He loves that place. He’s just that good there. And Bobby (Pierce) is right there with him. Bobby can move around — there’s nobody that can run the cushion as good as Bobby. There’s a few of them that’s figured it out, but (J.D.) is that good there.”

When asked if Durham takes any satisfaction watching the car he built have so much success from afar, he answered, “That’s not me. But I’m proud of him, and I know that’s a good car.”

“I don’t think you couldn’t build nothing today that’s any better,” Durham said. “Like I say, don’t get me wrong, he could build another car at Eldora and still win the race. But he’s comfortable in that car. That’s 50 percent of the battle.”

Another challenge Davenport’s and his Big River Steel Big Four competitors Tim McCreadie, Moran and Thornton have faced is the three-track, five-race playoff. Davenport said it’s been “definitely interesting for the fans” before sharing more of his opinion.

“It’s kind of cool. It can be good, it can be bad,” Davenport said. “The problem with doing it is we don’t race against the same 43 guys every week (like in NASCAR, which has used a playoff system of its own since 2004). There’s so much moving and stuff, cars and people and things. And the pill draw. The 10 points for fast time, that’s so big. That’s two positions on the racetrack unless you’re running fourth and fifth.”

That said, Davenport would like to see some tweaks to next year’s Lucas Oil Chase for the Championship format.

“I think that needs to be worked on a little bit,” Davenport said. “If they’re going to give that many points to fast time, they ought to give points to the top-three or top-five. Maybe five points for (second) and one point less (for each spot) from there. That might need to be adjusted. But it is cool.

“Weather does play a factor. NASCAR, they’ll race on Wednesday if they have to. We can’t do that. Maybe we can spread it out a little more, have at least one bye weekend in there, something like that. That way we have the opportunity to have either off before Eldora or we have to make that weekend up if we get rained out maybe.”

Davenport has at least another shot to race for a national title this weekend. If he does overcome the deficit and captures the $200,000 championship bonus, it’d be his fourth Lucas Oil title, which would tie Earl Pearson Jr. and Jimmy Owens for most all time. The $100,000 DTWC winner’s purse means that a $300,000 weekend is on the table, too.

Davenport doesn’t know how many more chances he’ll get at racing for a national title — he’s unclear whether he’ll return to the Lucas Oil Series next year — so if anything, he just wants nice weather so he take matters into his own hands.

“I really hope the weather doesn’t play a factor in this,” Davenport said. “I really hope we get the same old racetrack that we like at Eldora and we can all race, and we’ll just see how it turns out.”