SPRING VALLEY, Minn. — Chris Madden still isn’t rolling like it’s 2022, but winning Friday's 25-lap NAPA Auto Parts Gopher 50 preliminary feature at Deer Creek Speedway had him feeling positive about the trajectory of his race program.

“Our (Rocket) car was really good tonight,” Madden said following his $5,000 triumph. “I was very happy with what we had there. It was dead nuts.”

Standing in the pit area after climbing out of a modified — he accepted an offer from a mod team parked alongside him to make his third career start in the open-wheel division and finished 14th in the 25-lap feature — the 48-year-old star from Gray Court, S.C., spoke with a growing sense of confidence. He didn’t lead the entire distance despite starting from the pole position, but he exerted full control over the field once he passed race-long pacesetter Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., to gain command on lap 14.

Madden cut through lapped traffic in the closing circuits of the caution-free race and beat Overton to the finish line by 0.514 of a second. Combined with his sixth-place run in Thursday’s preliminary feature — a wild affair in which Madden said he was “dodging bullets” while racing with a pack of hungry young rivals — he topped the event points to land the pole position for Saturday’s 75-lap, $50,000-to-win finale.

The 3/8-mile oval’s surface had some extra traction early in the feature after a light rain shower briefly delayed the program during the modified B-mains, but as the moisture burned off it came right to Madden.

“We started moving around and I felt really good,” Madden said. “Before Brandon started moving around, I thought I got going pretty good in that middle line. It’s hard to say what his car was doing because I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing and my line, but when he moved off that top he wasn’t as good and I got him (with an outside sweep in turns) three and four.”

The triumph was Madden’s fifth of the 2023 campaign and first in more than a month, snapping a drought extending back to his pair of victories ($6,000 prelim and $25,000 headliner) on May 25 and 27 in World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series action at Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio. His victory rate is exactly half of what he achieved last year when a Thursday preliminary score at Deer Creek was his 10th checkered flag of the season.

A even more telling statistic to illustrate a tale of two seasons for Madden: his $51,000 in first-place earnings for his five wins this year pales in comparison to the whopping $288,000 he'd collected at this point in 2022, buoyed by four $50,000 paydays.

Madden finds himself in perfect position to nab his first $50,000 check Saturday. He finished second in last year’s 75-lap Gopher finale but in a unique manner: he was scheduled to start from the pole but relinquished the spot to instead start 12th and take a challenge posted by TraLo Trailers and Speedwerx that would have paid him an extra $25,000 if he emerged victorious.

No move-back challenge has been issued this year — though Madden wouldn’t take it anyway.

“My year has been very up-and-down, but it’s been down for a long time, I guess since May,” said Madden, whose bid to win last year’s 75-lap Gopher fell short when he was unable to overtake Overton for the lead in the final laps. “I haven’t really had a steady, stable balance to where I can really fine-tune my car, so I feel like we’re headed in the right direction. But I don’t think I’ll take starting 12th tomorrow.”

VIDEO: Watch highlights from Friday's Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series prelim feature at Deer Creek.

Brandon Overton Seeks Speed

Brandon Overton stood alongside his David Wells-owned Longhorn car during technical inspection after Friday’s 25-lap feature with a stern look on his face. He was pleased with his runner-up finish — especially after Thursday’s headliner that saw him plummet from running fourth in the early laps to a dismal 14th-place finish — but was still lacking something.

“Whatever … we ran second. Not bad,” said Overton, who led laps 1-13 before ceding the top spot to eventual winner Chris Madden. “We got a little better. I probably should’ve just stayed momentuming it (around the outside while leading). (Madden) could run down there (in the corners) and kind of shoot out of it where I would kind of hang, like be lazy.”

The 32-year-old star wasn’t satisfied with the performance of his machine, an almost-new mount he debuted two weeks ago during the Firecracker 100 weekend at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa. He’s frustrated with his inability to hit on a consistently fast setup.

“Nothing I throw at it is doing anything,” Overton said. “It just slides. Everything I got just slides around, no matter what we do to it. It’s fun when (the track surface is) like that, real patchy, but … when I was good, like last year and the year before, I’d go in there and the thing, you can just feel it digging and going. It’s just not doing that. It’s just so numb.

“Like, I get it, it’s the (new National Late Model) tires, I know. But nothing I’m doing to it is getting it any better.

“It’s way better than last night, but who knows?” he added. “If I try to make it better than that tomorrow, it might be 10 times worse. That what sucks when you’re out here. It’s hard to race and test at the same time.”

Overton has found that what’s worked for him in the past isn’t working now. His run in Thursday’s prelim feature was a perfect example.

“Last night was exactly what I ran when we won (last year’s Gopher finale) — like everything, identical,” Overton said. “And I was fast for like four laps, and then it got slick and we fell back. Which is not new to me … I feel like we can do stuff to it and squeeze a top-five out of it, but who the hell wants to run fifth? So when you change things sometimes you might run 20th and last night was one of ‘em. It wasn’t like I was way upset that we went backwards. It is what it is, so we have to take our struggles and keep on going.”

Overton is scheduled to start seventh in Saturday’s 75-lap feature as he looks to claim his first victory since a $50,000 WoO-sanctioned win on April 22 at Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala.

We’re steadily working on it. I just haven’t hit on it,” said Overton, a seven-time winner this season despite a winless streak approaching three months. “The first time I got fast, I was doing the same thing — I’d be hit or miss, hit or miss, and finally I got that feel. We just gotta work at it.

“It ain’t the car. It’s just everything we’re doing to it. We can’t do what we used to do, so we’re just having to work extremely hard. It sucks, because you get used to winning and doing good all the time and then everybody starts beating you, but it’s part of it.”

Brandon Sheppard's Enjoyable Weekend

A break in the World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series schedule provided the perfect opportunity for Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., to go racing with well-known engineer, team owner and Longhorn Chassis/Bilstein Shocks representative Kevin Rumley. His first two nights in Rumley’s Longhorn developmental chassis — renumbered with B-Shepp’s familiar No. B5 — have lived up to his expectations.

“We’ve been trying to find a weekend to do it for a while,” Sheppard said of hooking up with Rumley. “It’s been a lot of fun. It’s hard to go outside the box and try stuff when you’re running your own stuff, so this is cool. Kevin’s always wanting to try new stuff.”

Sheppard, 30, said Rumley’s “test” car is significantly different from the Longhorns he’s been driving this year, but it’s proven to be “really fast” in the weekend’s preliminary programs. He finished a solid third in Thursday’s 25-lapper and rallied from a subpar qualifying effort Friday to finish 12th after starting 18th in the nonstop feature, positioning him in the sixth starting spot for Saturday’s $50,000-to-win showdown.

After previously only being a casual acquaintance of Rumley while he was running for the Rocket Chassis house car team, Sheppard has worked closely with the North Carolinian throughout his first season fielding Longhorn machines with his new Sheppard Riggs Racing operation. He’s getting a firsthand look at Rumley’s expertise.

“He’s just so smart,” Sheppard said of Rumley. “He’s definitely smarter than me and probably smarter than anyone I know. He just has a different mindset to this. At first it was a little bit difficult for me to just communicate to him what I’m feeling with the car, but I’m getting better at it. It’s been fun to do things different than I have.”

Odds And Ends

With a fifth-place finish in Friday’s 25-lapper, Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., was the only driver to tally a top-five in both preliminary features. Combined with his runner-up placing on Thursday, he was second in event points to secure a front-row starting spot alongside Madden for Saturday’s 75-lap finale. … Ten of 16 drivers locked into Saturday’s headliner are Lucas Oil Series regulars. The four travelers who have to run a B-main Daulton Wilson of Fayetteville, N.C., Tyler Bruening of Decorah, Iowa, Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa., and tour points leader Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., whose fourth-place finish in Friday’s feature was not enough to overcome his loss of all his event points from Thursday because of his disqualification for making contact with Hudson O’Neal’s car after the checkered flag. … Lucas Oil Series director Rick Schwallie spoke to competitors twice before the start of Friday’s program — first with all Lucas Oil Series regulars, then at the regular drivers’ meeting — to address Thursday’s hard racing that included the Thornton-O’Neal confrontations which boiled over in heated fashion. “I just said, ‘We all need to do better,’ and everything went much better tonight,” Schwallie said. … Not surprisingly, Thornton and O’Neal ended up in the same heat race Friday after tussles the previous night. There were no issues between the two as Thornton won the heat over O’Neal and then finished two spots ahead of O’Neal in the feature. … Forecasts calling for rain to start hitting the track around race time proved incorrect, but precipitation did fall for a short time during the modified B-mains, causing a slight delay. The Late Model feature ended at 9:45 p.m.