ROSSBURG, OH — With time winding down in Wednesday’s first 25-lap preliminary for the 51st World 100 at Eldora Speedway, Johnny Scott was leading the race and thinking about what happened to his twin brother Stormy in an identical situation almost exactly three months ago.

So, not surprisingly, Johnny wasn’t sneaking even the slightest peek at the large video board outside the second turn to gauge how much of an edge he had on his closet pursuer. 

“No, no, no, no,” Johnny insisted later outside his hauler in Eldora’s upper pit area when asked if his eyes glanced at the video board for some help. “Stormy said he did that (in June 9’s first preliminary feature for Dream XXVII) and he hit wall, and I’d known that from the last time and I was like, ‘Nope. I not gonna look. I’m just gonna go where my car feels good and drive this thing, and if it works out, it works out.’”

The strategy did work for the bearded 31-year-old Scott sibling from Las Cruces, N.M., who learned from his brother’s miscue — Stormy admitted that he climbed the turn-one wall and handed the lead to Brandon Overton with three laps left in June’s crown jewel preliminary feature because he watching the big screen caused him to enter the corner a split second too late — and kept his focus to score an upset victory worth $10,000 in the opener of Eldora’s four-night, double World 100 week.

Of course, Johnny conceded that he didn’t dare do anything that might have shaken him out of his tunnel-vision approach.

“Honestly, I was so nervous that whole race,” said Scott, who competes as a teammate to his brother with the Rancho Milagro Racing operation fielded by their grandparents Ed and Trudy Healy. “I never even looked at my signal guy. I never looked at the screen. I never looked at s---. I looked at the track the whole time and tried to hit my marks.”

Scott was admittedly in shock to even find himself in position to turn around his moribund season with a triumph on the biggest stage in Dirt Late Model racing.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Scott, who took off from the outside pole and grabbed the lead for good on lap two from polesitter Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C. “I never would have thought in a million years I’d be starting on the front row of this qualifier tonight and winning this deal.

“Nick Hoffman (the eventual runner-up driving a Scott Bloomquist Racing car) has been fast and he has a lot of experience at this track. There were a bunch of good guys starting right behind me (including eventual third- through sixth-place finishers Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., and Overton). I was like, ‘Man, if I can salvage a top-five with these guys, this is gonna be a helluva night for us.’ Going out there and winning one? Heck, it’s even better.”

It was a dramatic turn of fortune for Scott, who has struggled to make the transition from open-wheel modified racing to the Dirt Late Model ranks. While his brother dabbled in full-fender action in 2015 before going full-bore in the division as a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series regular since ’19, Johnny’s first-ever Dirt Late Model start came in June 2019 when he entered Eldora’s Dream weekend in Stormy’s backup car. Since then Johnny has more gradually worked his way into the Late Model realm, entering 22 events in ’19, 38 last year and 32 so far this season after Wednesday.

Scott has enjoyed some success driving a Late Model, most notably a runner-up finish in January 2020’s Wild West Shootout finale at Arizona Speedway outside Phoenix and a late-June stretch of Lucas Oil Midwest LateModel Association-sanctioned racing last year that saw him win twice (at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., and Salina Highbanks Speedway in Pryor Creek, Okla., and register two second-place finishes. But hasn’t made much progress this season, tallying just a pair of top-10 finishes as his high-water mark (seventh on Jan. 26 at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., eighth on Jan. 17 at Arizona Speedway) and absorbing a dizzying 15 DNQs.

The last several weeks have been especially disheartening for Scott, whose outings in some of the sport’s biggest events saw him fail to qualify for the Prairie Dirt Classic, USA Nationals and Topless 100 and record a lackluster 22nd-place finish in the one big show he did make (the North-South 100). After missing the cut on Aug. 27 for the second feature of the Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned Rumble on the River at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway, he headed back to his team’s shop in Crossville, Tenn., to not only regroup but also rethink his place in the sport.

“I’m just trying to learn this, and it’s been dragging me down because we’ve been going to all these big races and I ain’t been making the show,” Scott said. “We ain’t picking up no speed. We change this and that and it’s like, ‘Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just need to step back and just go some stuff that ain’t as hard, something that’s not gonna have all these (national-level) guys at one place.’”

Scott is smart enough to understand, though, that he must power through his growing pains. He keeps reminding himself that he’s an accomplished modified driver — in 2018 he won the $50,000 United States Modified Touring Series national championship — and that better Late Model results will eventually come if he just keeps plugging away like Stormy, who has shown a decided performance uptick this season with his first career Late Model victories (a Lucas Oil win on Jan. 28 at East Bay and a PDC qualifying feature score on July 30 at Illinois’s Fairbury Speedway) and several other contending runs.

Stormy’s improvement has kept Johnny pushing ahead.

“It’s given me motivation to try and do better, because it’s like, ‘Well, Stormy can do it. I know I can do it if I apply enough time and effort into it,’” Scott said. “I said, ‘Well, I just gotta do it. That’s all there is to it.’

“We ran some modified races this year, and then I was like, ‘Man, if I ever want to do good in Late Models, I’m gonna have to get in one and just do it and see what happens. If not, I’m never gonna get any better.’”

Since June’s double Dreams, Scott has been campaigning a Longhorn Chassis, bringing him in line with Stormy’s chassis brand and allowing him to better hone his skills.

“Honestly, just me making lap after lap, and getting beat down and just learning how to drive these things, that’s been a big help,” Scott said. “We were here in the Bloomquist cars in ’19, in ’20 I had a Rocket, and now this year, Stormy had really good success with these Longhorns (Stormy switched from Rocket to the Trinity, N.C.-based brand last fall), so it doesn’t make any sense for us to be teammates and run different cars.

“We gotta work together. I can’t be on my own, because he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. He’s been doing it for two years longer than I have, and I’m still learning stuff from him and his crew. They’re up to speed a lot more. Me and my crew, this is all new to us. We’re modified guys.”

Wednesday’s success gave Scott the sense that yes, he can make it as a Dirt Late Model racer.

“Just finally getting a win, it’s a weight off my shoulders,” said Scott, who debuted a new Clements Chevy engine Wednesday after previously using a D-3 Ford powerplant. “We’ve had people the last two years just saying, ‘You guys are wasting your time. You can’t do it. You guys are never gonna be a Jimmy Owens or a Scott Bloomquist, or anybody.’ Which, we may never be as good as them, and that’s fine. Them guys, they’ve done stuff that’s unreal. I’m perfectly fine if we can come here and be competitive and get us a win here-and-there. Heck, this is all I’ve ever wanted to do, is race Late Models.

“I get more comfortable every time I get out there and make laps in this thing. I figure out where I need to run, the lines. Like I was telling the DIRTVision guys earlier, the problem I’ve had here at Eldora is I’ve never qualified good enough to start in the front, so I’ve never had my car in clean air to get a chance to feel what that feels like. I’ve always been behind every time so I could never go anywhere. Finally tonight we got out (front) there and that was huge. I was like, ‘Holy s---! This car’s never felt like this!’

“It’s just learning stuff like that,” he added. “I mean, I don’t know nothing about air (and its effect on a car). The first time I came here I almost hit the wall head-on because I entered the corner behind Dennis Erb and nobody told me you can’t do that … you just lose the nose. Just stuff like that, just feeling out racing with guys, it’s a learning experience. I don’t think anybody ever learns it all. You’ve just got to take a little bit at a time and get better and better.”

Scott noted that he personally feels he’s “a year or two away” from attempting to tackle a national tour full-time like his brother, but claiming a checkered flag at Eldora certainly gives him confidence that he has the ability to make such an ambitious bid in the future.

“Winning this $10,000 super race at Eldora at the World 100 … this is a dream come true,” said Scott, who didn’t qualify for the Dream finales in 2019 or earlier this season but did finish 21st in the 2019 World 100. “It was unbelievable. I was looking at the crowd and I was like, ‘Holy s---! I finally did this.’ I mean I know it ain’t the big race, but still, it’s a big race to me. If we don’t have any luck the rest of the weekend, my week’s already set because we had some success finally.

“This sport’s very humbling, so who knows? We may not win another race this year, but at least we finally got one.

“I was telling (crewman) Levi the other day, we ran modified and Late Models this year, and we haven’t won one race. I bet you in the last 10 years I’ve never gone a full year and never won a race. I won like 30 races in a year (previously)! But this year, everything we’ve done, we’ve had bad luck or just not run good. I was like, ‘I’ve never gone winless, but I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do it this year.’ And hell, tonight we pulled it off, and it’s just a weight lifted off my shoulders.

“When I passed the checkered flag I was looking around and I was like, ‘Did I just win this goddamn thing?’” he added. “Then I went over the scales and I’m looking at that light and like, ‘Well, it’s green,’ so I pull on the stage and it’s like, ‘Wow!’ That’s about all I can say.”