Tim McCreadie found himself in an advantageous position as Saturday night’s 67-lap Dirt Late Model Stream Invitational drew to its conclusion.

There was the 46-year-old star from Watertown, N.Y., chugging along the inside lane around Eldora Speedway in pursuit of cushion-pounding leaders Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., and Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill. McCreadie was gaining steadily on the tightly-bunched pacesetters, and he figured it was more likely than not that they would both remain glued to the outside rather than change course and dive low to take his increasingly quick line.

“I figured they might give it a turn, you know what I mean?” McCreadie said later when asked if he thought the Illinois stars would abandon the cushion and block his impending challenge. “But if the one guy that was leading is getting signals that the guy behind him is running the same line and it’s staying the same (margin), then you probably don’t move. I don’t know if everybody’s got hand signals for a guy that’s coming in third place, you know what I’m saying?

“And Bobby was probably the same way (as Sheppard) — he’s running so good up there that he probably said, ‘I’m just gonna get him, and if I get him, I’m probably just gonna get away.’

“I think them two racing with each other helped me because they were digging for each other and they probably didn’t even know I was coming,” he added. “It just kind of worked out for us.”

Indeed, McCreadie caught the leaders with less than 10 laps remaining and used his inside approach to snatch second from Pierce on lap 62 and the lead from Sheppard on lap 64. The Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series regular then survived a lap-66 caution flag that triggered a green-white-checkered finish to win the spectator-free race’s $50,000 top prize by 0.629 of a second over Pierce, who overtook Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga., for the runner-up spot on the final circuit as Sheppard slipped to fourth in the final rundown.

McCreadie emerged triumphant in a thrilling, down-to-the-wire feature, the type of dramatic affair that would have had the masses in Eldora’s grandstands roaring if coronavirus concerns hadn’t closed the event to fans.

“The race fans had to enjoy it,” McDowell said, referring to the thousands of people watching the live broadcast of the unprecedented Eldora show on FloRacing. “It looked awful exciting from my seat.”

“It was a heck of a good race,” offered Mark Richards, the owner of the Rocket Chassis house car driven by Sheppard. “The bottom was rubbered, the top had a cushion — we had two lanes. We had a great racetrack.”

The two distinct grooves that developed on the high-banked, half-mile oval directly led to the stirring finish. McCreadie’s discovery that the lower route around the track fit his Donald and Gena Bradsher-owned Longhorn house car transformed him from a driver headed toward a decent result to one capable of capturing the biggest Dirt Late Model prize so far in the Covid-19-interrupted 2020 season.

“I got under (McDowell) on a (lap-35) restart and then he drove back by me and he was arcing wide and I thought, Man, maybe I need to arc out there once,” said McCreadie, who started 13th and cracked the top five for the first time on lap 32. “I arced out once through there and the car went, ‘Whoop!’ and I’m like, ‘That’s it, right there.’

“I never thought I’d get back by Dale, but we did (for fourth on lap 39). Then as long as I stayed in the clean air and down low … it was just a little sticky in that one spot. I don’t feel like it rubbered, I just feel like it got clean there for my right-rear more than anything. From (turn four) off I couldn’t use any throttle.”

McCreadie just kept on smoothly negotiating the hub during a furious green-flag stretch from laps 35-66. He began to noticeably close on the leaders after the lap counter passed 50.

“You do what gets you there,” said McCreadie, who overtook Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., for third on lap 47. “What got all those guys (Sheppard and the 17th-starting Pierce) to the front was ringing the cushion and what got me to the front was running the bottom.”

McCreadie’s crew chief, Philip Snellen, informed T-Mac from his infield signaling position halfway down the backstretch that the inside was indeed where he needed to be.

“Initially when the green flag dropped, I didn’t think we were any good. I thought maybe a top 15 finish,” Snellen said. “But as the race went on we kept getting better and better and I thought, Maybe we’ll get a top 10, maybe a top five. About 15 to go I thought, ‘Hell, maybe we’ll have a shot at this if the cards play out right.’

“On the bottom he was pretty good. He went to the top a couple times when he had a little bit of a lead (over his closest pursuer), but I think we were better on the bottom. I told him under the cautions that on Race Monitor we were pretty good (with lap times) on the bottom and he was gaining on ‘em.

“I shouldn’t say I was hoping (Sheppard and Pierce) would mess up,” he added, “but when you gotta run the cushion like they were it’s a little treacherous at Eldora so things can happen.”

After Sheppard, 27, regained the lead from Davenport on lap 36 and Pierce slid into second place one circuit later, the Illinois standouts soon came together in a battle for the top spot. Both drivers powered around the cushion at both ends of the track, their cars’ engines singing at full song every lap as they fought to control their machines on the ragged edge.

“I knew Bobby was right on me the whole time, and I think me and him can run the cushion about as good as anybody,” said Sheppard, the 2019 Dream champion at Eldora. “We were really ripping up there, and I didn’t think anyway, unless it rubbered on the bottom, that anybody was gonna pass us down there.”

The 22-year-old Pierce, driving a car built by his Hall of Fame father Bob that he debuted the previous week in the World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series doubleheader at Davenport (Iowa) Speedway, struggled to corral a virtual bucking bronco every time he drew close enough to Sheppard’s rear bumper for the churning air to affect his own machine.

“My grip was tensed up,” said Pierce, whose car sported thoroughly crunched right-rear bodywork from his multiple slaps of the outside wall. “When you’re behind someone you don’t know what the car’s gonna do one second to the next. It was definitely like a Macon (Speedway, a fifth-mile bullring in Illinois) on steroids. I hit the right-front in the wall a few good times, one time pretty good. And when you hit the wall sometimes your brakes go to the floor for a second, and then they’re back. It’s a little sketchy.

“When you’re by yourself, it makes it a completely different race car. You get a few car lengths from someone, really, five car lengths from someone, and you can feel it get a little loose, but when you two car lengths from someone you get tight and loose at different times.”

Watching and signaling his son from the inside of the homestretch, Bob Pierce could see the difficulty Bobby had when he tucked in close to challenge Sheppard.

“The clean air for the leader was so much better,” Bob Pierce said. “(Sheppard) could do what he wanted, and it kept him driving in the corner better than (Bobby) could, because (Bobby) had to flip the car instead of drive it because the air (from Sheppard) was getting on his nose.”

At one point, when the elder Pierce noticed that McCreadie wasn’t gaining significant ground on his son, he signaled Bobby to turn up the wick to pressure Sheppard.

“He was kind of just lagging back on Sheppard not to kill everything he had, including the quarter-panel,” Bob Pierce said. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna close my (signal) sticks up and see if he’s got anything left,’ and I did, and he run right up on Sheppard. But there wasn’t nowhere to go. He couldn’t get a clean enough slide-job on him.”

Soon thereafter, McCreadie began to find more speed running the inside. Richards and Bob Pierce realized McCreadie was using the traction down low to erase his deficit to the leader, but their drivers couldn’t simply change their strategies and duck to the hub to stave off the coming threat.

“I knocked the spoiler off so I couldn’t run the bottom,” Pierce said, “but to run the top I was still fine because there was a wall to lean on.”

“Once you’re committed, you’re committed,” Richards said. “You’re tires won’t go to the bottom, so you can’t just go down there and slow up. Them guys that are running that bottom have cool tires on, so we’re committed (to the cushion).”

In the final analysis, Sheppard might have been able to hang on to the checkered flag if not for some trouble he experienced with slower traffic. When he caught Tyler Erb of New Waverly, Texas, with less than 10 laps remaining, he ended up in the same situation that Pierce was fighting behind him.

“When Brandon caught Terbo and couldn’t get around him,” Pierce said, “you saw the same thing that was going on with me (chasing Sheppard).”

Sheppard pushed noticeably in turn one while directly behind Erb on lap 63, opening the door for McCreadie to charge underneath him and assume command. Richards immediately understood what had happened.

“The only problem we had, we had a lapped car that was getting told from pit area to move down, and he wouldn’t move,” Richards said. “When you’re behind a car and, depending on the cushion, and the air isn’t on your car, you’re not going as fast as you would be as whenever that car gets out of the way and you got full air.

“It’s just, (a lapped car has) gotta get on the bottom or get on the top. You don’t run in the middle at this place late in the race. That’s the worst place you can be. When you got a lapped car that’s running in the middle of the racetrack and sliding up to the top, it’s a problem.

“You talk about the air or whatever, and it’s gonna happen with these cars,” he added. “It happens with sprint cars. It happens with any type of race car, so it’s not just these cars. If (Erb) would’ve been on top, we would’ve been fine. The problem was, he was in the middle.”

Sheppard acknowledged that he ended up in a precarious position.

“When we got to lapped traffic I knew they were holding me up pretty good, and then I seen the 39 (McCreadie) down there,” Sheppard said. “Obviously after he passed me I went down there (to the bottom groove) and I thought, ‘Oh, OK, that’s why.’ It was rubbered up down there.”

The race ultimately came down to a deciding green-white-checkered sprint after Erb blew a tire with the white flag waving to bring out a final caution flag. With Eldora rules calling for a double-file restart right to the end of the feature, Sheppard lined up outside of McCreadie with Pierce and Davenport in the second row.

McCreadie employed all of the savviness he had picked up over more than two decades behind the wheel when the green flag flew. He changed his corner entry just enough to play perfect defense on his pursuers.

“My plan at first, as I was riding around under yellow, was to just keep doing what I’d been doing,” McCreadie said. “When I got the good run off of four and got down into one, I thought, Why the --- would I go in on the bottom now?’ I mean, I didn’t go in right on the cushion, but I certainly didn’t go in far from it. I just went in through the middle as hard as I could and kind of drifted to the cushion to catch that little bit of brown.

“Even if I went in on the bottom really soft they might have had such a run over here off of two that they’d go by me, so when I got off of two Phil gave me the sign that I had like a car length or two and I arced my normal line through three and four. I thought, Wow, this felt really good, and then I actually went in a little wider through one and two than I did before. I saw the (video) board and I didn’t see Sheppard and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ I didn’t know if he broke or what, but I didn’t see him. I saw the white car and I thought, I think I got a little bit of a lead on Bobby. Phil gave me a good-sized lead down the backstretch when I come off two and I thought, Just don’t mess up.”

Snellen had little doubt that McCreadie would handle the restart with aplomb.

“Maybe I’m a little biased, but I think Tim McCreadie is the best restart guy in the pit area,” Snellen said. “He looked over to me a couple times under caution and I told him where I thought he needed to be, and he protected the top going into one, kind of entered in the middle and slid up, and then coming down the backstretch I gave him his lead and he moved back to the bottom and that was pretty much all she wrote.”

As McCreadie pulled away just enough to create some breathing room, a wild scene occurred behind him. Pierce slid up the track between turns one and two, causing Davenport to check up and absorb a bump to his car’s rear end from Mason Zeigler of Chalk Hill, Pa. — causing the two drivers to finish ninth and 11th, respectively, after restarting fourth and sixth — while Sheppard became bottled up on the outside of turn two and fell to fourth and McDowell shot through an opening to second place.

“My plan was to stick around the top there and see what I could do, but McCreadie slid across there and then a herd of them followed him,” Sheppard said. “It was pretty crazy there for the last couple laps.”

Richards didn’t think Sheppard had much of a chance to pull out a victory on the final restart.

“Not with that bottom rubbered like it was,” Richards said. “We may have had a shot, but the problem was, there was guys out of line on the restart (not taking the green nose-to-tail in each row) and I guess that doesn’t matter, so I guess we should’ve been more out of line than we were.

“It didn’t fall our way, so I’m not mad about that part of it,” he added. “I’m not upset. We drove back into the lead and had a good run.”

Pierce, meanwhile, needed some breaks to propel him to a prize that would have been richer than his $49,000 World 100 triumph in 2016.

“I thought, Well, we’re gonna be seventh when the race is over because I wasn’t good on the restarts,” Pierce said. “But I was like, ‘The right side’s already beat up. I might have to lean a little elbow on someone getting into one.’

“I had a good restart — actually, Sheppard had a bad restart — and I kind of stayed with T-Mac a little coming off of four, and as I slid into one I was watching the Jumbotron (video screen outside turn two) and I just kept coming up (the track) because no one was really there.

“If I had two more laps (after surging past McDowell for second place off the race’s final corner) I think we would’ve been side-by-side (with McCreadie) at the checker honestly because I finally had clean air. These cars are completely different with clean air, no matter if you’re running the bottom or the top.

“There were no cautions after we got to second until lap 66,” he added. “That’s really what hurt us. That’s the one thing that could’ve possibly won us the race. I needed a caution from the time I got to second and there was never one until I fell to third.”

The financial difference from first to second place was a hefty $40,000, but Pierce didn’t dwell on what could have been: “It’s the most money we’ve made all year.”

McCreadie was certainly thrilled to earn the 50-grand paycheck, which will go a long way to covering some household bills the full-time driver accumulated while not racing for two months because of the coronavirus crisis. He made a spectacular recovery from a rough Friday outing that saw his team pull out their second car because of engine trouble that felled their primary machine as McCreadie transferred to the preliminary feature through a heat and also brought joy to his new car owners who didn’t make the trip to Eldora.

In fact, Donald Bradsher learned of McCreadie’s triumph in interesting fashion just after Donald finished fourth in Saturday night’s Ultimate Southeast Super Late Model Series event at Lancaster (S.C.) Motor Speedway.

“The pretty cool thing was, I guess after the race he pulled up to the trailer and (officials) told him over the Raceceiver (one-way radio) that we won,” said Snellen, who spoke by phone with Bradsher after the victory lane ceremonies. “Tommy Grecco (McCreadie’s former crew chief with the Sweeteners Plus team and now a Longhorn employee) was down there with him and he sent us a video with Donald cheering us on from the cockpit, all excited, screaming and yelling and pounding the dash and stuff. Then Gena texted us when we were in victory lane. It’s great we could win a big one for them.”