SPRING VALLEY, Minn. — Flashing a megawatt smile while cooly leaning on a four-wheeler, Brandon Overton greeted a visitor to the inspection area following Saturday night’s NAPA Auto Parts Gopher 50 at Deer Creek Speedway with an entirely predictable rhetorical statement.

“It’s about damn time, right?” Overton quipped, a sense of relief evident with every word that tumbled from his mouth.

A $50,000 victory in the 75-lap Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series feature was a satisfying, morale-boosting breakthrough for the 31-year-old superstar from Evans, Ga., who has been searching all season to recapture the big-money magic he displayed throughout a historic 2022 campaign that saw him earn nearly $1 million.

“That’s racing for you right there,” Overton said. “Struggle, struggle, struggle, and then …”

A driver’s winning ways return. Just like that.

Of course, it should be pointed out that Overton hasn’t been an also-ran this season. Far from it. He arrived at the three-day Gopher 50 weekend with eight victories on his ledger — not exactly a sign of a down-and-out racer. What’s more, in the 11 events paying $50,000-or-more that he had entered, he registered five podium finishes (including runner-up placings June 4 at West Virginia Motor Speedway and June 25 at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa.) and sits second 14 laps into June 12’s Dream at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, that had its remaining distance postponed by rain to Sept. 7.

Overton’s frustration resulted from the fact that he hasn’t been matching the lofty — otherworldly, even — standards he established last year. All his pre-Gopher 50 triumphs this season had been five-figure scores, but none was worth more than $15,000 and no more than two came in any single month. Last year he roared into July with 17 victories at 10 tracks, topped, of course, by his four-race sweep of the double Dreams at Eldora to the tune of $273,000. He had $91,159 in 2022 first-place earnings before Saturday, a vast difference from the $415,575 in winner’s purses he had at the same juncture in 2021.

“When you win, you get used to winning,” Overton said. “And when you win a big one, you’re like, ‘Well, I can do it.’ And once you know you can do it, anything other than winning sucks. So when you do run second or third, it kind of pisses you off.”

Thirteen of Overton’s 31 feature wins in 2022 were worth at least $20,000. Five paid $50,000-or-more, including the two six-figure Dreams, Eldora’s $54,000 World 100 and 50-grand checks in the North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., and the Texas Dirt Nationals at Fort Worth’s Texas Motor Speedway.

This year? Nothing that rich and important as the Fourth of July passed by, leaving the confident and vastly talented Overton doubting himself.

“I just told (crew member) Kent (Fegter, I said, ’Hell, I didn’t know if I knew how to work on these things or even know how to drive it any more,’” Overton said. “To get us a big one, it makes the trip (which he began with June 30’s Lucas Oil Series stop at Florence) a lot easier, you know what I mean? We can go to (Iowa’s) Stuart (International Speedway for the July 11-12 XR Super Series doubleheader) and kind of relax and get back home.”

VIDEO: Hear from Brandon Overton and the rest of the top-five finishers Saturday at Deer Creek.

With Deer Creek’s oversized 50-grand check tucked in his trailer, Overton had a giant weight lifted off his shoulders.

“When you get beat, there’s nothing worse,” Overton said. “It aggravates the hell out of me to lose, so it just makes you work a little harder. It makes you stay in the shop a little longer. You know what I mean? You’re just more determined.

“So many people have come up to me and they’re like, ‘Man, you’re not as fast as you were last year.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, no s---. I know. I’m trying.’ But the more people say that, the more it just, like, pumps me up. I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get it back, I’m gonna get it back.’

“It just shows you,” he continued, “keep working hard, keep doing it, don’t get down, and you’re gonna get back there.”

Overton’s experience this year has given him a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to remain at the very top of the Dirt Late Model world.

“What Scott (Bloomquist) has done, and what Billy Moyer’s done … you know how hard that is, to stay good all those years?” Overton said. “I’d say racing is tougher now than it ever has been. There’s not a car in these pits that don’t have the same s--- that we got, so you don’t have your high-class guys and your low-class guys just trying to race. Every one of these guys got the same stuff. We’re all pretty much open to the same technology pool, so it’s tough. You gotta put a whole damn night together.”

Overton did that in Saturday’s finale, albeit not without some worrisome moments. For starters, he was scheduled to take the green flag in the feature from third behind Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., and Chris Madden of Gray Court, S.C. — 2022’s top two Driver of the Year candidates — and that had him seriously concerned, but he was put at ease when Davenport and Madden accepted the offer to move back to the 11th and 12th starting spots, respectively, to chase a $25,000 bonus posted by TraLo Trailers and Speedwerx.

“I didn’t know if I could beat J.D. and Madden in clean air, so when they did that, it just kind of gave me a sense of relief,” Overton said. “I hot-lapped and they told me, ‘Yeah (they’re taking the challenge),’ and I come back over here and I said, ‘Hell, if I can get in that clean air I think I can be OK.’"

Overton traded the lead during the race’s first third with Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., and Mike Marlar of Winfield, Tenn. — the eventual third- and fourth-place finishers, respectively — before gaining solid control of the top spot. But as the feature wound down he had some uncertainty creep back into his mind.

“I just did what I always do and the thing was pretty good,” Overton said of his Wells Motorsports Longhorn car. “But when you’re out there leading, you don’t know where to go. Like, the thing (surface) was rubbered in the bottom but it was clean through the middle too so you could carry speed, and I didn’t know to be in the bottom or to be in the middle.”

Then along came the 47-year-old Madden, who surged from fifth to third on a lap-54 restart and soon turned up the wick to make a last-ditch bid to win the race and the big bonus. Madden slipped past McCreadie for second off turn two on lap 71, and on the 72nd lap Madden appeared primed to drive around the outside of Overton rounding turns one and two but instead made contact with the lapped car driven by Kolby Vandenbergh of Ashland, Ill., who slowed thereafter with a cut left-rear tire to bring out a caution flag.

Overton said he was unaware that Madden was pressing him for a dramatic victory, “but I knew somebody was there because I kept seeing the (photographers’) cameras flash. Kent don’t want to mess me up so he don’t want to tell me to go up or go down, so he’s just telling me how close they are. He’s holding the (signal) sticks telling me they’re on my ass, and I’m like, ‘Do I go high or do I go low? Where the hell do I go?’

“The 15 car (Vandenbergh) was there, and I said, ’Man, (Madden’s) not gonna pass me on the bottom, so maybe he’ll stick his nose up in there and I’ll see him,” he continued. “I think somebody said he ended up running into the 15 car and that was the caution. Then I kind of got a breather, and Kent was telling me, ’Just get in the middle and go.’"

Overton had to calm himself in the cockpit before the final restart with three laps remaining.

“One of the Worlds or the Dreams or whatever (last year) when Madden blew around me on the top (to take the lead), it was dead locked-down on the bottom, but he drove around me right out there in the middle,” Overton said. “So it gets you thinking. I just kept playing that back through my mind, and I told myself I just gotta enter hard enough into one for him not to slide me or do anything. Just drive it in there hard enough and don’t scoot, just get it gripping and going forward. So that’s what we did and it worked out for us.

“But man, I was nervous as hell,” he added. “When you ain’t won in a minute, you get a little nervous, you get the bugs back. Last year it was never like that. You get in a rhythm winning ’em and it’s like, ‘Whatever. I’m gonna do whatever I think.’ If you lose, you lose. When you ain’t won one, the pressure’s a little higher.”

As Overton noted, though, the pressure he felt was all internal. None came from his car owner, David Wells, or Wells’s son Eric. That wonderful support from his bosses is ultimately what keeps him rolling and makes him the winner he is.

“He don’t say one thing. I’m telling you, he is good s---,” Overton said of David Wells, who watched Saturday’s race broadcast from his home outside Sarasota, Fla. “Most times, when you have success like we did last year, it’s easy to get down, and then it’s easy to be like, ‘We need to do something different.’ Like, I hear it through the pits all the time (from struggling teams) — ‘We need to do this or we need to do that.’ He’s never said, ‘Hey Brandon, you think we need to do something to the car? You think we need to change motors? You think we need to change shocks?’ He don’t get in it. He just stays out of it and tells me, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, stay with what got you here.’

“He hasn’t been like down or pissy about (the slip in success). I mean, hell, they spend a lot of money, so when you don’t do good it’s like, ‘Aw, hell, I’m spending a lot of (the car owner’s) money, I’m not doing worth a s---, is he gonna get mad?’ And he’s not going to, him and Eric. Eric’s called me every day and said, ‘Hey, listen, we’re all in. Whatever you need to win the race, you let us know.’ And I’m hard-headed as hell, and I just keep doing it and doing it and doing it till I figure it out.”

Overton paused, and the summed up his current situation with David and Eric Wells: “I get all the glory for doing this, but they’re the reason I do good, without a doubt. They put zero pressure on me to do anything, you know what I mean? If I wanted to go home tomorrow and not go to Stuart, they wouldn’t say a damn word. They’d say, ‘Load this s--- up and go home.’ That’s what makes me feel good. Wanting to just make them happy because I know how much they give to me … yeah, it’s fun.”