What qualifies a Dirt Late Model race as a true crown jewel event?

Jonathan Davenport is a good person to ask. He’s certainly won enough of the races that go in the category, the latest coming Saturday at Lernerville Speedway when he finally added the Firecracker 100 to his already bulging, first-ballot Hall of Famer resume.

“It’s the prestige of it, the longevity of it,” Davenport said while leaning against a counter in his Double L Motorsports team’s trailer after celebrating his $50,000 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned victory. “And it’s an event.”

It was a simple description, but one that sums up Davenport’s long list of triumphs — now a staggering 24 — in races that are widely considered crown jewels of his chosen division. The Firecracker 100, which has been contested every year since 2007 and has paid $50,000-to-win since the Lucas Oil Series took over its sanction in 2022 from the World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series, checks all the boxes for the 41-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga.

“I’ve heard of the Firecracker ever since I started racing,” Davenport said. “This race has always paid good money. It didn’t start out paying, that I know of, you know, $5,000 or $6,000 (it offered a $30,000 top prize from 2007-21 except for one year, in ’08, that paid $40,000), and I remember back when we (first started) to come here, we used to play a kickball game (for charity), they had the horseshoes — we never played that — and then they had a beanbag tournament, I think, one time.

“There was always a big crowd, a lot of campers, so it was an event. It wasn’t just a race. Everybody always really enjoyed coming here.

“And then, you know, when the World of Outlaws had it, it was one of their bigger races that they had, so I thought it was a crown jewel even then anyway,” he added. “I don’t know if anybody else considered that it was, but if it wasn’t, well, then I wouldn’t have it circled on my calendar and it wouldn’t have been really meaningful to win.”

Indeed, the Firecracker 100 has long been on Davenport’s hit list. In recent years it’s become an even more important race for him to conquer because it was one of the only crown jewels left on the schedule that he hadn’t yet won.

Just look at Davenport’s roll call of crown jewel victories entering this year’s Firecracker 100: World 100 (five times); Dream (four times, including a third straight just two weeks ago); USA Nationals and Silver Dollar Nationals (three times); North-South 100 and Show-Me 100 (twice); and single successes in the Prairie Dirt Classic, Eldora Million, Topless 100 and Knoxville Nationals. That left just Lernerville’s marquee event and the Dirt Track World Championship for Davenport to complete a career crown jewel sweep.

Capturing the Firecracker “finally checked that one off,” Davenport proudly said. The DTWC, a race he’s started 14 times since 2010 with a top finish of second in ’18 at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park, now stands as the last remaining notch for his belt.

It took Davenport nine starts in the Firecracker 100 finale to break through. His first feature appearance was a 12th-place finish in 2011 driving for legendary chassis builder Barry Wright and his best shot at victory was almost certainly in ’14 when he started from the pole in the K&L Rumley Enterprises No. 6 and led laps 12-67 before a broken rear end knocked him out for an 18th-place finish.

“I’ve haven’t been coming here consistently until the last few years since Lucas took it over,” Davenport said. “When we were running Lucas (and the Firecracker was sanctioned by WoO), sometimes they would run against this, sometimes we took a weekend off, so this wasn't a a place we came to a lot, but, I always liked the place. It’s a unique racetrack.

“We just never really have been in contention. I mean, I ran third once or twice here (third in 2023 after leading laps 1-44, fourth in ’19 and again in ’23) but just never was really in contention for the win (except in ’14). I felt like that was the one we could’ve won. I hadn’t won a crown jewel at that point and I felt like this was going to be my first one. (The car) was really, really good … we kind of snookered them on tires. It had rained, and everybody went soft (on tire choice), and we actually went hard and got the lead.”

Davenport rolled into Lernerville this time still riding the high of his $100,000 Dream XXXI triumph on June 7 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, his most recent racing with June 13-14’s Lucas Oil Series doubleheader at Smoky Mountain Speedway in Maryville, Tenn., rained out. So his eye was on the Firecracker 100 prize — perhaps even more concentrated by the fact that he had won two preliminary semifeatures during the 2023 weekend and one more last year — though he still didn’t have the same laser focus that he displays heading into Eldora’s major events.

“It was business as usual here for him,” said Cory Fostvedt, Davenport’s crew chief since 2022. “Just the same old. I mean, obviously everybody’s been a little more upbeat since the Dream. We haven’t raced since then.”

Davenport agreed that he didn’t approach the Firecracker 100 with the same get-out-of-my-way attitude as Eldora, but his desire to reach victory lane was assuredly at a heightened level. He wasn’t able to build any extra confidence, however, because rain washed out the two preliminary nights, turning the weekend into a one-day affair on Saturday.

“I felt like we had a really good opportunity to come here and run good, but, you know, I felt like it kind of sucked that we got rained out on the two preliminary nights because we had some things on our mind we wanted to try here to try to get better at this place,” Davenport said. “So we didn’t get to do them, so anywhere from hot-lapping to qualifying, we were like, ‘Do we try something or do we stay safe?’ We was bouncing those things off of each other all day today, and sometimes we’d go safe and a couple things we’d try. So we didn’t get to do everything we wanted to, but we got to do some of them, and obviously, it was good for us.”

The deluge of rain that pummeled Lernerville for 90 minutes Friday evening shortly after the preliminary had been cancelled for a lighter burst of precipitation added more uncertainty, but Davenport was pleasantly surprised with how the 4/10-mile oval’s surface endured taking on so much water.

“I didn’t even know if we was going to get to race as much as it rained last night,” Davenport said. “I mean, dude, there was a river running through here (his parking spot in the lower end of the pit area), so it was bad. Some places get that much rain and just go ahead and call it off, especially after we’ve been rained out for two days prior to that.

“So yeah, nobody knew what the racetrack was going to be. Obviously, the track prep crew done an excellent job of where it wouldn’t get rough. It seemed like in (turns) three and four there, it just barely started breaking up (during the 100-lapper). All the way in the bottom there where the water would settle, it definitely got pretty rough right there. 

“I think if they would have went out (before the feature) and tried to (prep) the bottom up, it would have got real rough for sure. So they was smart enough, you know, not to do that. They tried to give us a racetrack. They lilied the top just enough where there was a little bit up there, and it just played in our favor because the bottom was a little rough. You really couldn't make consistent laps in it, I wouldn’t think, or, you know, it would be a little bit of attrition, and the top wasn’t a big curb but you could lean on it, so it just played right in our hands to run right through the middle.”

And Davenport ran that shiny, icy-slick track to perfection. He took the lead on lap two from Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., and paced all but circuit over the remaining distance, ceding the top spot only briefly to Thornton on lap 85 following a thorny exchange in turns three and four with Thornton, the eventual runner-up who fell short of a third straight Firecracker 100 victory, and third-place finisher Max Blair of Centerville, Pa.

Longhorn Chassis managing partner Steve Arpin mentioned afterward that Davenport’s impeccable performance was “like watching a surgeon.” Fostvedt, who spent the race signaling Davenport from inside the middle of the backstretch, agreed.

“That racetrack there, he raced it like Eldora,” Fostvedt said. “Just kept the car nice and straight and square underneath him, running through the middle. Diamond off one end, run around the bottom if he needed to, run around the top if he needed to. But I don’t think I ever seen him counter-steer at all. I mean, he did an awesome job. He did a really, really good job.”

That scrape with Thornton and Blair was really the only time things became hairy for Davenport. Coming right after a lap-84 restart, Davenport absorbed a hit to his Longhorn machine’s left-rear corner from Blair, who had restarted second, just after entering turn three and received more contact to the left-front of his car from Thornton, who was able to beat Davenport to the start-finish line to lead lap 85.

“That was pretty close,” Davenport said. “The deal was, like, after the restart, I knew I didn’t get off turn two very well. I pushed just a little bit getting in and hung a little bit, and I didn’t get a good run down the back straightaway. But, I felt like I’d been getting off turn four really well, so I went in turn three like I always did and went to turn back, and as soon as I turned back I got hit in the left rear and it turned me sideways.

“Well, as soon as I got turned sideways, I seen a black car and orange and blue, and that was Ricky. Well, he bounced and bounced up into me, and I’m like, ‘How the f--- did he hit me twice?’ He hit me in the left door and left-front wheel, and Max had hit me in the left-rear quarterpanel and left-rear wheel, but obviously, I can’t see behind me, so I didn’t know who hit me at first. 

“And then I seen Ricky beside me and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ You know what I mean? Then when we hit pretty hard again coming off turn four, it bent the left-front suspension and messed the (steering) rack up and stuff. I figured he was just gonna go (on to win), and I was like, Damn we’re going to have s--- happen again.’ Just going down there straightway, my steering wheel moved, so I knew something was wrong.”

Davenport said he managed to quickly adjust to the steering problem and he “just went in there (to turn one) right on (Thornton’s) door and kind of held him down, and I guess he got a little loose or whatever, and then we got away from him” to regain command. Thornton later said that he “slowed down in one” and purposely let Davenport “get back in front of me” because he blamed himself for catching a hole wrong and getting into Davenport.

“We race together too much to destroy a guy for a win,” Thornton said. “I felt like I needed to get a little better.”

Whatever the case, Davenport was still the class of the field as he went on to beat Thornton by 0.848 of a second. The off-kilter steering couldn’t stop him even when he approached a pair of slower cars on the final lap.

“I couldn’t really steer as good as I had been because my steering wheel was off or whatever,” Davenport said. “Basically it knocks the toe out, so, like, if your steering wheel moves, you know the toe is wrong. It could either be in, it could be out, it could be something, but your steering wheel moves because the tie rod either got shorter or longer, and the only way it could get longer is if it bends the spindle on it.

“So something happened and the car wasn’t as good as it was at that point, but it could have messed something up on Ricky’s too. So I just tried to make the most of it and just screwed my seat up and just tried to get up on the wheel and just try to make really good laps. 

“And there in the end, you know, we caught lapped traffic and I’m like, ‘Oh, s---, I don't even know what to do here because they was running two-wide,’” he continued. “I just tried to keep my momentum up where I could get a good run off of each corner there on the last lap, so that way, if one of the lapped cars did mess up, at least I would have enough momentum to try to go one way or the other and not get blocked behind.”

With a clinching move, Davenport secured his elusive Firecracker 100. And he added another crown jewel, another victory that put him in the rarified air of all-time greatest driver conversation with the late Scott Bloomquist, a three-time Firecracker 100 winner.

“When I was out there leading, I was like, ‘You know, there’s this one other guy who used to be really good running through the middle here. He used to win quite a few here and he won quite a few quite a few at Eldora, too,’” said Davenport, who pushed his 2025 win total to 10 (including three straight with his Dream prelim and finale victories) and closed with five points of Thornton for the lead in the Lucas Oil Series standings. “Ol' Scott (Bloomquist) was on my mind there. That man taught me a lot.

“This is a place that he would come and race here because it was prestige. It was a crown jewel. Even when he would run Lucas, he wouldn't take off, he would come here and race. That makes winning it mean even more.”

Correction: Fixes Davenport's crown jewel total to 24 sted 23 with three Silver Dollar Nationals victories, not two.