FOUNTAIN CITY, Wis. — Tyler Erb was in a good mood because he won Friday’s Dairyland Showdown opener at Mississippi Thunder Speedway, and one of the reasons he won was … because he was in a good mood.

Those feelings go hand-in-hand for Erb, the 28-year-old racer from New Waverly, Texas, who doesn’t deny that he needs to be in the proper frame of mind to perform at his optimum level.

Tie him down, make him conform, force him to race at tracks that he doesn’t like, and Erb won’t be at his best. He readily admits it. In fact, as he smiled and joked through an interview in the pit area after leading Friday’s 50-lap World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series feature from flag-to-flag for a $25,000 payday, he thanked his Best Performance Motorsports car owner Eric Brock and his other supporters for allowing him to embrace his free spirit.

“The people that basically pay for this and help me do this, they understand that I’m like a …” Erb said, pausing for a moment to consider the right analogy. “You ever watch a Western (movie)? I watch a lot of Westerns, and I’m like that horse that you’re just not going to tame. You just let it run around, a wild horse. You can’t break it, right? Yeah, like when you try to break me, then I’m not me, and then I’m useless. Like I’ll just be the horse that lays there.”

Erb finally left behind the mentally draining grind of national touring last season when he dropped off the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series in the spring to focus on running where and when he wanted. The move resulted in his most productive season ever, a career-high 19-victory campaign that included 11 wins on the DIRTcar Summer Nationals and triumphs at 18 tracks.

The 2024 season was Erb’s self-proclaimed Fun Tour, and that pursuit of happiness is back this year. It’s why he gave up his perfect attendance on this year’s Lucas Oil Series by skipping the circuit’s event on Friday at Circle City Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind., to enter the WoO action at Mississippi Thunder, a 3/8-mile oval that fits his modus operandi.

“This is Fun Tour right here,” Erb said, praising the Wisconsin facility where last year he publicly proclaimed for the first time that the Lucas Oil Series wouldn’t be his focus by entering the Dairyland Showdown (though the conflicting Lucas Oil events rained out so he didn’t actually miss a series race until a few weeks later). “It’s a better track. I like being here. Circle City’s nice. Florence (the Union, Ky., track scheduled to host the Lucas Oil Series on Saturday) is nice, too. I just like Mississippi Thunder, so once again, what I like is what I’ll probably do better at.”

Erb did very well in Mississippi Thunder’s Friday program, which became the weekend’s opener (and had its first-place prize increased from $10,000 to $25,000) after rain washed out Thursday’s action. He was in his groove as he first outdueled Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., to win his heat and then raced off the pole position to lead the entire 50-lapper while turning back mid-race challenges from Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., and Hoffman.

“It was a good night,” Erb said. “Like, start-to-finish, it was a really good night, smooth and nothing crazy happening.”

Beating Hoffman in the heat to give him a shot at drawing the pole was key for Erb, who enjoyed the close, hard racing he engaged in with Hoffman during the prelim.

“He was like, ‘Hey, thanks for not turning left,’” Erb said of Hoffman. “I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I mean, I was just hoping the top was good enough for a couple laps so I could get ahead and then make s--- happen, but he raced me very clean … and as I’ve always said, ‘Fair is fair.’ So, like, I didn’t wreck him, you know what I mean?”

Hoffman only briefly threatened Erb in the feature, ducking under Erb shortly after he took second on lap-17 restart from Pierce, who had done the same to Erb a few circuits earlier. Once Erb began hammering the extreme outside of the track’s corners, he pulled away to lead by as much as a straightaway before ultimately beating Hoffman by 1.421 seconds.

“Everybody (on his crew) in infield, from what I could gather, was telling me I need to be in the middle of (turns) three and four,” Erb said. “In one and two, I felt like I wasn’t losing much time, but three and four, I was like, ‘Gosh, damn, like, if I don’t run this just right, I kind of mess up,’ and I just finally was like, ‘I see Hoffman.’

“When we hit lapped traffic, I was kind of moving around. I messed up for one corner, and then the next corner I got a hellacious run (around the top) and I never checked it and I split (the lapped) Sam Mars and Austin Smith or (Tristan) Chamberlain, I parked on the lapper’s nose, and I was like … I’m gonna be honest, until five to go, I never looked back for a signal. I was just like, uh, I feel like I’m going fast on the top, and as long as I don’t mess up …

“It’s sketchy up there. It’s like a traction patch,” he continued. “Like, (a cushion is) never even really built up. It was just, you can see the traction, but it’s very sketchy. Like, if you slide to it, you’ll slide through it and kill yourself. It’s crummy traction that you have to be committed to because you might go in and not steer or you might go in and get free if you’re not in it enough.”

Erb said he “would just drive into one and let out of the gas a little bit and then stay in the gas and carry speed, and then kind of the same thing in three. And when I would try to slow down and hit the brakes, I felt like I was going to wreck because I pushed a couple times and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm going to die.’ ”

But Erb was, in a sense, comfortable with the way he negotiated the track. The surface fit him well.

“I know it may not have looked like it in the past couple years,” he said, “but that’s what I’ve always been good at.”

Erb secured just his fourth career WoO triumph and first since April 22, 2022, at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio, the site of all his previous wins on the series that he ran regularly from 2016-18. (He won twice at Atomic in 2018.) Of course, he hasn’t run the WoO tour much since he became a Lucas Oil follower in ’19, but he did snap a 36-race WoO winless streak during which he topped out with one runner-up finish and five thirds.

The victory also came just two weeks after his first score of 2025, a $21,000 checkered flag in April 19’s Schaeffer’s Spring Nationals-sanctioned Lil’ Bill Corum Memorial at Tazewell (Tenn.) Speedway. He called his pair of wins “a nice stretch” and went on to detail what has him rolling well.

“Everything’s just working good,” Erb said. “I’m comfortable, so I can do something like that. When you’re not comfortable, you can’t do stuff like that. I got a good combo, right?”

Erb noted that his mix is quite unique in the scheme of the current Dirt Late Model scene, which is another factor that motivates him.

“I just stick to myself and my people,” Erb said. “I have like a good group of people. I’m not in the clique, you know what I mean? I don’t like cliques. I don’t fit in with the cliques. Like, it’s just not my jam, you know? I’m not Rocket-Fox. I’m not Longhorn-Bilstein. I’m not an Infinity-Bilstein. I’m just Best Performance, and we have Rocket cars because it’s what I’m comfortable with and I run Integra (Shocks), because (Scott) Keyser, D.J. (VanNoordwyk), Brian (Daugherty), they’re good as gold to me.

“And my guys are really good, and we’re all young. I say ‘young’ … I’m getting old, but we’re all around the same age.”

Erb’s full-time crew members currently include 27-year-old Cody Carl and Caleb Todd, a 24-year-old from Mississippi. He also has help this week and next (for Illinois Speedweek) from 23-year-old Aubrey “Wormy” Vaughn, another Mississippi native (he traveled with Todd as a crewman for Mississippi’s Spencer Hughes in 2021) whom Erb is hoping to keep on long-term.

According to Erb, Brock gives him free rein to assemble his crew.

“My car owner, he lets me bring in people when I need them and I want them,” Erb said. “If I have to buy extra pit passes, I’m like, ‘Hey, we got to pay this guy because I need more help,’ like with Wormy this weekend, and he’s fine with it.

“Honestly, he lets me be me, and that’s the only way I’ve ever been good at anything. Like, with school, I went about school the way I wanted to go by school. And I got good grades, I was really smart, but I did it for myself.”

There’s that unbroken horse in him, just wanting to let things flow. And as Erb stood in the pits after changing into street clothes — wearing a heavy jacket and a Houston Astros winter hat on a chilly night — he was certainly in his element and enjoying the moment, ripping off a bunch of shout-outs in rapid-fire fashion.

“Oh, hey, and it was E.T.'s birthday,” Erb said, referring to Todd’s mother. “And I forgot to mention (Georgia racer and Erb sponsor) Steven Roberts in victory lane, so make sure you put this in there because he can be like, ‘Ah, damn, you didn’t say my name.’ He does a lot for me. And Scott Keyser (of Keyser Manufacturing) — he’s out of control, coming up with ideas for these silly-ass fire suits I wear. And Mark (Richards) and (Steve) Baker and them (at Rocket Chassis), we just get along.

“Oh,” he continued, “and put Magic Mike in there. He babysits my dog. He’s like our shop neighbor (at the team’s home base in St. Marys, Ohio). He lives by the shop. He actually makes us dinner on holidays, like Easter and Thanksgiving, we go to his house.”

All seems perfect in Terbo’s world as he marches through another Fun Tour that will likely include plenty of Summer Nationals events in the coming weeks — or, really, just whatever he wants to do.

“That’s just how I go about it,” Erb said of his take-it-as-it-comes philosophy. “If I was worried about points for Lucas right now, I would be miserable, because I just can't plan it like that. It’s not cool, really. But maybe that’s why I’m never going to be Kyle Larson. Who knows? 

“But I’m OK with that, really. Like, I like to go to J. Marie’s (Wood-Fired Kitchen and Drinks in Wapakoneta, Ohio), have some beers, eat my steak, work on my race car, hang bodies, do s--- the way I like it, whether it’s right or wrong, and just go from there, you know what I mean?”