Going on three years now, Bobby Pierce has showcased his dominant ways are here to stay.

Saturday’s World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series event at Marion Center Raceway is another testament to the 28-year-old’s solidifying greatness: fastest in hot laps, overall fast qualifier, dominant heat race win, a flag-to-flag victory in the 60-lap feature. | RaceWire

It was indeed a quintessential performance for the Oakwood, Ill., superstar. Yet beneath the run-of-the-mill showing lies a few noteworthy observances: a growing confidence at wall-less tracks like Marion Center and a relentless pursuit to stay on top of the technological trends of the sport.

More surprisingly, racetracks without outside retaining walls once toyed with Pierce’s throttle-mashing style, oftentimes making him second guess himself. His father Bob can see, especially after Saturday’s performance, just how far his son has come at places that once challenged him.

“I think he’s getting a little more comfortable with it. Like, he knows he don’t charge the corner (on a racetrack that has no walls) like he does with the wall,” the elder Pierce said. “And I love seeing him roll out down this backstretch going into (turn) three tonight because that was, like, being really careful. Turn one, he finally decided not to run the top and run a slider line (through the middle of the track) making sure he don’t fall off (the track).

“It’s a little trickier, though. He has good eyes. When there’s no wall, you can’t see s--- and it’s easy to fall off.”

Pierce didn’t need to rim ride around Marion Center’s generously-measured quarter-mile oval for very long Saturday, only the early laps when he snatched the lead from pole-starting Ryan Gustin. From there, Pierce exploited all kinds of grooves to pull away from eventual runner-up Nick Hoffman and the third-finishing Gustin throughout the feature. 

“I loved seeing the rain (earlier in the day), it added character to the racetrack. You had to chase some moisture, you couldn’t just ride through the black necessarily,” Pierce said. “I’d be diamonding the corners, sometimes I’d be entering smooth. In the beginning, it was the top. 

“Like we were at Marshalltown. It was fun, you had to move around. The line changed, and changed at the very end. I was running the bottom and caught the lapped cars, so I had to move up again because that momentum came back. Definitely moved around a little bit.”

Pierce himself said he’s “back and forth” on his preference for racetracks without walls, saying there’s definitely truth to him needing to foster confidence at tracks of that nature. 

“Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I guess I grew up racing at Tri-City (Speedway in Granite City, Ill.) a lot,” Pierce said. “I grew up racing Pevely (I-55 Federated Auto Parts Raceway) a lot, though it was far away. I grew up racing Peoria (Speedway in Illinois) and Farmer City (Raceway), they don’t have a wall in one and two.

"But a lot of our racetracks around home have walls, but I think it’s easy to judge the wall. When tracks don’t have walls, it’s hard to judge right where that fine line is. If you have a wall, you can’t go higher than the wall.”

Simply put, the elder Pierce said that “Bobby’s talent won him the race” because “there wasn’t a wall where he could bounce off the cushion Fairbury-style.” The elder Pierce has also noticed his son diversifying where he wins his features. Of the 84 total features he’s won since 2023, the majority by default are on black-dirt tracks in the Midwest (44), but six wins are in the Southeast and four wins are in Pennsylvania.

Other geographical feature win totals for Pierce since 2023 include 18 in Indiana-Kentucky-Ohio-West Virginia, 10 at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park’s Wild West Shootout alone and two in Florida.

“I think going to Smoky Mountain and Senoia earlier this year, winning at super-slick places — well, not super slick, but it has that dirt that doesn’t have any grip — so we learned how to do some stuff there,” the elder Pierce said. “Every month, someone comes up with something new to try on how you set something up or how you measure something, whether that’d be the droop.”

While his son has been developing into a more well-rounded driver in recent years, the elder Pierce has been staying on top of technological trends of the sport. Bob estimates that his son’s No. 32 team still abides by “60-70 percent” of the same core setup routines that upstarted their 30-win-season success in 2023. 

Staying in regular contact with Longhorn Chassis staffers Kevin Rumley and Matt Langston, as well as the company’s co-owner Steve Arpin, while experimenting when they feel like it help the Pierces make up the remaining 30-40 percent of the sport’s ever-evolving setup trends.

“Nobody will tell you what everyone is doing, but they’ll say, ‘Hey, I heard someone is doing this, this might be the new thing coming up.’ And it might not be a lot,” the elder Pierce said. “It might be a quarter-inch on something here or an eighth-inch on a droop limiter, or checking the droop limiter a different way. Bump stops are always a big deal on the right-front. As choppy as the track was, it can get real easy for the car to bounce on the right-front.

“It still did it a little bit, but it’s better than what we have been. Racing, racing, racing makes Bobby a better driver. … You learn little-bitty things as you go. Also, Bobby hasn’t raced as much as the old-timers. I’ve watched them guys do that stuff growing up and would think, ‘How’d he do that?’ He just picks up information as a driver.

“We constantly stay on top of shocks. We wear the spring-masher out, keeping numbers where we think they should be,” Bob added. “If you don’t venture too far off from where you’ve been, it gets you back on track. Sometimes it’s OK to take big ol’ swings, because if you go third to 10th, then you’re like, ‘Whoops, that was too much.’ Then you try again.”

Reflecting on a six-race losing streak entering the weekend — an insignificant number for most drivers, but a bothersome one for the Pierces — the younger Pierce requested that he’d approach undisclosed areas on the race car setup-wise differently.

“I told Bobby, ‘Hey, it’s a points race, but if we don’t try it now, we’ll never learn,’” the elder Pierce said. “He said it to me two nights ago, ‘We’re staying in our little box of ours. It’s time to jump out of it.’ I’m all about that. I’m ready to do that, as long as it’s fine with him and we run good because it falls back on him.”

What’s made his son look so good the last few years is that his No. 32 team has been able to stay within their wheelhouse setup-wise but find subtle advantages at various kinds of racetracks. On Saturday at Marion Center, the elder Pierce said they took “big swings” on four different areas of the race car.

Usually, “I’ll do, say, one out of four things,” said the elder Pierce, who added, “I rarely do four things at once. That’s how I’ve usually done things. I was pretty nervous.”

Beyond winning the race itself, the on-track results were pleasing to the elder Pierce.

“I was happy to see the car do what it did. Like in the middle of the corner, if it hangs too much, then oh, we’re screwed,” the elder Pierce said. “But this thing didn’t hang much. It pulled off the corner very good every time.”

Pierce’s consistency the last three-and-a-half years has been remarkable. He’s now won 105 features over his last 315 feature starts since the start of 2022, an even 33.33% win percentage.

That means he averages two races between victories, a statistic that the elder Pierce feels daily with his son whose desire to simply win can’t be bridled. At Illinois Speedweek, for instance, Pierce won May 6’s opener at La Salle Speedway, but finished the week with a third, fifth, 26th and a third, results that frustrated him and his dad.

“We won La Salle, and all of a sudden, what the hell happened? There was a couple stupid little things, a shock mount in the wrong spot that wasn’t supposed to be on that car,” the elder Pierce said. “It was a weird deal. Then the spring masher went off kilter at Spoon (River) and we didn’t catch it ’til Farmer City. Now you’re second-guessing your numbers, and you’re wondering how you won La Salle. You’re checking stuff, checking stuff, but we recalibrated (the spring masher) and that fixed a lot.

“It’s frustrating because when it don’t work and when we don’t find it, it’s, ‘What do we have to do now?’ I know we have to pay the bills and he wants to win, and I love that part about him. If he loses that fire to win, we might as well quit. That’s when you’re like, ‘I’m settling for third.’

“When I quit racing, I settled for second a lot. The last year I raced (in 2004), we had a lot of seconds. I could’ve won ‘em, but I lost the fire after 35 years. But as long as he doesn’t lose that fire, that’s a good thing. It just makes it rough for me,” Bob added through a laugh.