Josh Rice slept through the entirety of his team’s five-and-a-half-hour haul to Lernerville Speedway on Thursday, which wasn’t surprising since he was coming off a 10-hour overnight shift at his full-time job.

When the 26-year-old driver from Crittenden, Ky., finally awoke around 2 p.m., he clambered out of his toterhome and grabbed his initial glimpse of the 4/10-mile oval that was about to become the first track in Pennsylvania he’s ever raced at.

“We parked right here, I stepped out of the truck, and I didn’t know what I was looking at,” Rice said several hours later while standing in his trailer — situated at the end of the pit area’s front row along the turn-three exit lane from the track — after Thursday’s opener of the Firecracker 100 weekend was postponed by rain. “But I’m like, If that’s the backstretch, I’m not going down over that hill, which I went and looked at. You got a little bit of play room (off the racing surface) you got like 10 feet, but as soon as you hit that grass, you might as well just turn right and go down over the hill. It’s a lot steeper than I thought.”

Seeing Lernerville in person was a lot different for Rice than driving around it while playing a video game or watching countless videos of past races at the place. The backstretch’s drop-off to oblivion was an especially intimidating eyeful, but Rice, seeking to expand the horizons of his burgeoning racing career, embraced the challenge of the unknown.

Of course, attempting his first Firecracker 100 riding a wave of confidence — pushed to a sky-high level by his monumental $30,000 victory in June 6’s Dream XXXI preliminary feature at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio — helped put him in the right state of mind.

“I’m normally not good with places without walls, but we won at Brownstown (Ind.) a few weeks ago, and every race we watched (of Lernerville), we feel like it races kind of like Brownstown, so we got our Brownstown set up on it and hopefully it goes,” Rice said. “It seems like the top gets so far around there, but it seems like it’s always got that strip around the bottom you got to hit, and that’s kind of how Brownstown was” when he won May 31’s $10,000 Northern Allstars Late Model Series event.

“I know this is a lot bigger than Brownstown, but that was kind of our mindset. (Crewman) Shawn (Fulwood), and James (Rice, Josh’s older brother), we always watched videos and were like, man, we think we’d be good here, and this happened to work out this weekend where we could do it.

“I’m pretty good here on iRacing, (an online racing simulator), and that was about all I’d known about it really,” he continued with a laugh. “I didn’t know, I didn’t have a clue getting here, like, where the campground was, whatever. The first thing I thought in the drivers’ meeting, I was like, ‘Where do you go on the racetrack?’ Like, I don’t know anything about it. So it’s definitely new for us, and I think it’ll be good for us. We need to start getting out of our area more and go where we’re not comfortable and learn more about the car. I think that’s the only way you’ll get better at stuff like this.”

Rice has made a name for himself in his home region, especially Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., his home track where he’s become well known for ripping the cushion and winning regularly, including a pair of Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series events in 2021 and ’22. He hasn’t strayed too far away from his familiar territory, however, aside from four appearances in the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway (2015, 2022-24) and a few Speedweeks trips to Florida’s East Bay Raceway Park and Volusia Speedway Park.

Lernerville is one of those bucket-list tracks where’s he wanted to test himself, though he has more, including Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway and Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis.

“I feel like anytime I try to land a ride or something, they tell me, ‘You don't get out enough. We don't see you race enough,’” Rice said. “So that's the main thing — I just want to expand out, hopefully show that I can run other places than in my area. And I’m like, ‘Well, right now it’s the perfect opportunity.’”

That’s one part because Rice is on a roll — until rain washed out his planned racing last weekend, he had won one feature in each of the previous five weekends — and another part because he’s obtained a sponsorship deal that allows his Rick Jones-owned operation to do more traveling.

“It’s one of them deals where we’re ahead, the race team’s ahead right now,” Rice said. “We got some money we can race on. It was $42,000-something (weekend at Eldora) by the end of it, because we got $8,000 for (finishing) ninth in the Dream. It was a heck of a weekend for us.

“I’ve always wanted to come here. I’ve always watched video. That's kind of how we race — we watch a video to see when they got a big race coming up, and we’ll decide, like, ‘I think we'd be good there.’ If we’re not going to be good there, we just don’t go, but it (also) seems like every time this (Firecracker) deal comes around, there's a five-grand at Florence, there’s a 10-grand at Florence, so it’s so hard to not go there.

“But it just worked out this weekend. I was like, ‘Hell, we got a fuel card. Let's just go,’” he added. “MC Tank Transport, (senior vice president) Rob Snyder, he actually got us that at the beginning of the year. I told these guys, I’m like, ‘We might not have it next year. We need to take full advantage of it.’”

Prepping for Lernerville wasn’t especially difficult either for Rice and Co. because he didn’t race last weekend with the rainouts of Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series shows at Moler Raceway Park in Williamsburg, Ohio, and Mudlick Valley Raceway in Wallingford, Ky. His car was ready to go, though he still was busy during the day at his race shop with other jobs related to his rough trip last Thursday to Rocket Chassis in Shinnston, W.Va.

Rice left late last Thursday night with crewman Tony Roell to pick up a new Rocket Chassis roller on Friday morning and then head to Moler. About halfway to the Rocket shop, however, the trip was short-circuited.

“We blew a truck tire at like 2 in the morning,” Rice said. “And when the truck tire blew, it pulled the exhaust off the truck, and we had a flat on the trailer. Me and Tony, we changed the truck and trailer tire, and we actually stopped at (fellow racer) Seth Daniels’s race shop (in Jackson, Ohio) and he fixed the exhaust.”

With Moler rained out, Rice made it to Rocket without being strapped for time. Waiting for him was his new car, freshly built but largely to the specs of a 2020-model XR1 rather than Rocket’s new XR1.2 design. Rice requested the older version because he simply feels so comfortable with it.

“We had two 2020 cars, and my brother’s car is a 2020. So we had three 2020 cars,” Rice said. “I swear, they’re the best race cars we’ve been around. We had a ’21 I didn't like. I think we ran one of our 2020s all through ’22, and I ended up crashing at Lawrenceburg, we had it clipped, and it never was right after that.

“We ended up buying this thing (his current 2020-version Rocket) in December of ’23, and we didn’t race it until August of ’24, and I’ve raced it ever since then. And then our new car, we told them to build it just like a 2020 car. It’s a little bit different, it has like a lightweight rear, but everything else is a 2020.

“Apparently I messed Rocket up a little bit,” he added with a smile. “They had their 1.2 (model) jigs out, and I’ve been the only one to call and order an old one for a while. They had to get the jig table ready for an old car, but they did good. They built a hell of a good looking race car. I can't wait to get it out.”

Rice thought Lernerville might be the place he’d debut the new car, but circumstances — not to mention his affinity for the battle-tested machine he’s been running — prevented it.

“We were planning on bringing the new car here, but then it turned into us working on the truck and trailer (in the wake of the problems during the trip),” Rice said. “Shawn showed up the one day (at the shop) and he’s like, ‘What the hell y’all been doing?’ I said, ‘Working on this damn trailer all day.’ He got to where he was looking at me and I could tell what he was about to say, and I’m like, ‘I’m done. I’ve done changed five tires.’ We did four trailer tires and one truck tire. I was done.

“Hell, I ain’t touched the new car yet. James mounted the seat in it, and Shawn put the oil system in it. That’s all we really had a chance to do to it. But I don’t know if I’d have raced it or not, just because the old car’s been so good. That’s the only car I’ve really had the last year-and-a-half. This thing, the front clip’s bent (from a recent incident at Michigan’s Crystal Motor Speedway), but it’s fast, and like I told these guys, I’m not scared to take it anywhere. I’m just comfortable in it, so I don’t know. It'd be hard to tell when we’ll get the new car out as good as this one’s been to me.”

If Rice had to guess, he’d say he’s most likely to make his first runs in the new car during July 11-12’s Kubota High Limit Racing Sprint Car Series doubleheader at Florence. There’s a pair of $3,000-to-win Super Late Model races that weekend, one which Rice is already anticipating greatly.

“I’m dying to watch sprint cars at Florence,” Rice said. “When I was in probably elementary school I watched some wingless sprints there. I’ve never watched the 410s there before, so I’m pretty excited to see that.”

Rice mentioned that it would be incredibly “cool” if he were to have a chance to run a sprint car himself at his home track’s High Limit race, but he knows that wouldn’t go over well with his mother.

“I would love to get in one,” Rice said. “I’d love for Kyle Larson to be like, ‘Here, this is the best of the best. Go out and see what you can do.’ I would literally love that.”

But “we told my mom that we got a ride together for this High Limit race at Florence,” he continued, describing a joke they played on his mother. “It was an immediate, ‘No,’ freaking out, panicking. So if I did land something, I would have to talk to my mom into it somehow because she was not a fan of the idea at all.”

Mrs. Rice knows Dirt Late Model racing is Rice’s forte, and it’s clear his star is on the rise. Even Rice has realized just how much his notoriety has increased. In fact, in the hours before Thursday’s Firecracker 100 preliminary program was postponed to set up a doubleheader on Friday evening, a steady stream of fans approached him in the pit area looking to buy apparel of the driver who showed so much emotion in his Eldora triumph.

“It’s been crazy,” Rice said. “I already texted my girlfriend (Adrienne Kearns) and a guy that runs my Facebook page. I’m like, ‘We’re messing up not having shirts here’ but we literally sold out (after Eldora). We had size Small and 5x left, we only had like 15 shirts left (total), so obviously it wasn’t worth bringing (a merchandise trailer).

“Normally we stock up like Ralph Latham (Memorial) time (at Florence) and we go to Eldora, and normally we can get by until the North-South (100 at Florence in August) … and I didn’t have anything left to sell. We had to shut (on-line sales) down (after the Eldora win) because it got to where we weren’t going to have anything left to sell at the racetrack the next day. And by like 3 o'clock (on Saturday of the Dream), I was like, ‘We might as well shut down (the trailer). There ain’t anything left.’ It’s insane.

“I work with Jamie Christie with Impact, and he’s working on the (T-shirt) designs and stuff. And he knows the pressure’s on, especially with Florence having a 20-grand (to-win Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series event) next weekend, but it’s been crazy the amount of people that have come by. Hell, I’ve seen my shirts here everywhere here. That’s pretty damn cool. I know I’ve sent a couple here, but hell, we’re over 5-and-a-half hours from the house and there’s people coming up everywhere. And it was like the same deal after the feature at Eldora — hell, I had a line from (the trailer) to the (homestretch inside) wall.

“We got a couple different designs in the works, and we have a few reprints,” he continued. “Actually, Adrienne texted me, she said, ‘If you’re top two in points come Saturday, I’ll bring a box of shirts.’ So that’s my goal right now, which is a very high goal.

The explosion in Rice’s popularity that’s translated to merchandise sales has opened his eyes to a serious new revenue stream — and his future in the sport.

“We took (the merch trailer) to Fairbury (for the PDC) and we did like twelve-hundred bucks,” Rice said. “We’re like, ‘That ain’t even worth it, sitting out here and sweating our asses to sell a few T-shirts.’ And I guarantee I could have done that already in the pits today with the people that stopped by and asked me if I had anything. I hate saying no, but I’m like, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t get ‘em printed fast enough right now.

“We obviously upped our (order) numbers for all of our sizes, and I couldn’t imagine what Bobby (Pierce) and J.D. (Jonathan Davenport) and Jimmy (Owens) and all those guys do (in merch sales). Like, it’s made me about want to just quit my job (working at the DHL shipping company) and just try to try to do this for a little bit. But I tell my buddies all the time, it’s like going to the casino. You have your good weekends and your bad weekends. We won 30 (grand at Eldora). We could go down that big ass hill tomorrow and spend 30.

“I don't know. It’s tough,” he added. “I’d love to love to get the opportunity to try it and go to more places like this. It’s definitely cool. Hell, I just like seeing them. I enjoy watching races, just as much as I do racing, so it’s cool to go to new places.”