Zack Dohm likes to be well-rested before climbing behind the wheel of his Dirt Late Model at the racetrack. And that means he likes to settle in on the couch of his team’s motorhome for a refreshing mid-afternoon nap.

“I’m the nap king,” said the 36-year-old Cross Lanes, W.Va., driver on Wednesday in tech inspection line at Eldora Speedway. “It just depends how much I sleep, I guess, but I could probably sleep in until 11, go out, work on a car for a couple of hours, and come in, lay on the couch, take about an hour nap, go to the drivers’ meeting and race. That's what I like to do.” | Complete Dream coverage

It’s a common routine among standout Dirt Late Model racers who often have late nights at the shop and long hours on the highway. In brief interviews with a dozen or so drivers competing in Wednesday’s FloRacing Night in America event at Eldora Speedway that opened Eldora’s Dream Week, about one-third of the drivers agreed that a nap was part of a successful pre-race routine.

Former Dream winner Shane Clanton of Zebulon, Ga., doesn’t often take a nap away from the racetrack — "I ain't got time to nap during the day. I got too much work to do” — but it’s part of his routine when he’s on the road racing.

“I just think it's just a mind reset. Just go relax for 45 minutes or an hour and just get right, right before you get in the car,” Clanton said. “Just quit worrying about everything. It resets the day.”

His crew members “all know not to wake me up. They got yelled at enough to know not to wake me up.”

Carson Ferguson, the 25-year-old Lincolnton, N.C., racer who is a regular on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series for Paylor Motorsports, says resting his eyes for 45 minutes to an hour before an evening race does the trick. The team gets up, unloads the car, reviews the previous night’s suspension setup and prepares the car for another night of racing.

“Depending on what time we get done with all that, if I got like an hour or so before the drivers' meeting, then I’ll take a quick little nap to get me through the night,” said Ferguson, who said team members have learned to provide a little privacy for the napper. “We don't really have too many people coming in and out of the truck. If any of us see the lights are out, we just try to be a little more quiet, so we don't wake anybody up. But sometimes we don't get the chance to, but it happens more when we have to do some driving after the race, to get to the next track or go back home. We’ll try to get some rest before” heading home.

Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., the 24-year-old SSI Motorsports driver and former World 100 winner at Eldora, doesn’t take a nap as part of his everyday routine, but will catch some shuteye if he needs it or has to prepare for a late night behind the wheel of the motorhome that tows his T-shirt trailer.

"I will every once in a while just depending on circumstances of traveling or whatever, but like today I won’t, probably tomorrow I won’t,” O’Neal said early Wednesday afternoon before the $20,000-to-win FloRacing program. “If we have a big day, like Saturday of the World 100, we have the drivers’ meeting or autograph sessions and all that stuff leading right up to the race, so I'll probably take a little bit of a nap kind of earlier in the day on Saturday. But no, it's not something I work into my schedule by any means. It's just something that if I feel like I need it, I will.”

Justin Duty of Molalla, Ore., a 28-year-old regular on the MARS Championship Series who is entering the Dream for the first time, often doesn’t find the time to take a nap at the track, but he wishes he could.

“My take on the nap at the racetrack is it's a phenomenal idea. It's a blessing of a thing if you can pull it off,” Duty said while sitting behind the wheel of his No. 15 in Eldora’s tech inspection line. “But really, for a guy like myself, where it's minimal crew help — I maybe have one guy or two maybe if I'm lucky — I can't shut my brain off long enough to nap. I can lay down and try. There's no way. Like I'm constantly thinking about things I should be doing or could be doing or this or that.

“If I fall asleep at the racetrack at about 3 o'clock and take me an afternoon nap, it is the coolest thing in the world. And I would do it way more often if I felt like I could pull it off, but I just can’t. It's hard to do. But I commend the guys who do it often. It's awesome.”

While taking naps are mostly a “pipe dream” for the Oregon racer, it’s a good way to prepare to race against some of the best dirt racers in the country.

“It definitely refreshes me. It gives me the ability to start with an open mind,” Duty said. “I’m not thinking about other things, which I can kind of do as it is, but it's just nice to not wake up and say, ‘All right, it's time to go.’ You know what you're doing today and you got a plan in place and you just try and go execute. You're not thinking about all the things that you didn't get done or you want to do or whatever else.”

Veteran crew chief Randall Edwards, who has worked for some of the sport’s best drivers and has prepared North Carolina driver Carson Brown’s car at Eldora, says he doesn’t remember taking a nap at the track in his career of more than 30 years. But at a recent event at Lake Cumberland Speedway in Burnside, Ky., he tried it for the first time.

“We had everything done and so about 3:30 or whatever, I laid down on the floor of the trailer — and I actually dozed off,” Edwards said. “When I woke up, I was like, 'I think that's the first nap I've ever took in my whole career,’ and that's been a long time.”

Maybe it works?

“Maybe it does. Or maybe I’m just getting old,” Edwards said with a laugh.

Tyler Erb of Ohio’s Best Performance Motorsports, Edwards’s former driver, says he knows who all the nappers are in the pit area: “The old guys.”

He reels off a list of names: Clanton (49), Tim McCreadie (51), Boom Briggs (53), Brian Shirley (44) and Kyle Bronson (34).

Bronson? "Kyle's an old man at heart, so Bronson takes naps,” the 28-year-old Erb said. “Boom's a big napper. I like going in (the hauler) and just waking him up and then leaving. Like I just ask him, ‘Hey, I really need …' and then I don't really need anything and then I leave.”

Erb never takes a nap at the racetrack and keeps a different schedule than many drivers.

“These guys, they don't work harder, they just wake up earlier and they think they work harder, but then they also nap during the day,” Erb said. “So like I catch a lot of slack because I wake up about 11 or 12,” although he added he makes an exception to get up earlier for a busy week at Eldora.

Teams that quickly load up each night only to unload first thing in the morning amuse Erb.

“That way they can hurry up and unload at 7 a.m. to work till 1 — and then sleep from 1 to 4,” Erb cracked. "You're sleeping the same amount. I don’t know. Maybe I have like ADHD or something, but I can't sleep eight times during the day. I’m not a cat napper.”

While Zack Dohm may be the king of naps, his wife Veronica gives him a hard time if he’s sleeping in the motorhome while his crew gets his No. 17 ready for action.

"My wife walks by giving me s--- the whole time like, ‘You got these people out there working? You just gonna lay in here?’ ” Dohm said. “Then I’ll say, 'Well, I gotta drive the rig home. I drive the race car, drive the rig to the track. Do you want us to get home safe?' I mean, after this 100-lap feature, I gotta drive us four hours home with our kids in the motorhome.”

Maybe the members of Team Nap have the right idea, at least this week at Eldora. Taking a nap gives you the chance to dream.

You don’t have to ask Ferguson twice if he wants to take a nap.

"I'm always able to fall asleep,” he said. “If I'm tired, I could fall asleep right there on the grid or I could fall asleep right on the trailer floor.”