ROSSBURG, Ohio — For Dirt Late Model racers at Eldora Speedway, if you’re not on the fuel all the way around the half-mile oval, you’re doing it wrong.

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Particularly on a Dream Week where rain and overcast conditions have kept the high-banked racetrack tacky and fast, drivers chasing Saturday's $100,000 payday are keeping their right foot 100 percent on the accelerator to gain as much as speed as possible.

“You give it all you got,” said driver Daulton Wilson of Fayetteville, N.C.

“Borderline stupid,” joked Michael Leach of Sun River, Mont., a Thursday night heat winner in his Eldora debut.

“We use all the 900 horsepower here — and it could take more if we could have it,” added Tyler Bruening of Decorah, Iowa.

Going petal to the metal is a must in time trials, likely on higher-speed conditions for heat races, and sometimes drivers are still full-throttle in a 100-lap feature even as the surface gets drier.

Dream Week action continued Friday with a complete split-field preliminary program followed by a makeup feature postponed by rain Thursday. The 50-lap features paid $30,000-to-win apiece and no doubt drivers were mashing their accelerators to the floorboard while trying to earn solid heat race starting positions for Saturday’s finale.

“This place here, when it's like how it's been so far this weekend, you just be prepared to drive your race car as fast as it'll fast as it'll go. There's no doubt about it. You're gonna go as fast as this thing will run,” said Milton, Fla., driver Joseph Joiner, who is looking for his first career Dream start. “To me, personally, this place is so wide and big it leaves you some room. If you do bounce wrong, you can kind of recover and not have to worry about being straight in the fence or over the top of a hill with no wall. For me, it's just put it wherever the groove's at, put it on the floorboard and hope you bounce the right way.”

Tanner English of Benton, Ky., driving a new Longhorn Chassis with a new Clements powerplant, is ready to mash the gas.

“Even when it's slick here, you're on the gas all the time,” the 32-year-old English said. “The banking, and it’s a big circle. Any time you've got a big circle you can hold it wide open most of the time. It almost gets slower when it's hammered down like that. Because your car is stuck … there’s only so fast we can go.”

The 22-year-old Leach enjoyed the rush of on-the-mat racing while leading all 10 laps of his Friday night heat race. He let off the gas a single time entering turn three when he got slightly too high entering the corner.

"I felt bad for the ol' girl actually, I'm not gonna lie,” Leach said. The car “just it got a little tight, so we had to get out of it, you know, nothing crazy. Borderline stupid, I guess, if you're looking for a quote. We're getting it around here. It's crazy. I told the boys after hot laps on Wednesday I was like, 'I knew this place was fast, but damn!’ That's stuff, being in the seat, like I have never felt, you know what I mean? Like that's crazy.”

Leach benefitted from what drivers love at Eldora: clean air out front when the presence of other cars doesn’t hampered aerodynamics.

"That's why I told the boys (if) we get out front, we're in good shape,” Leach added. “We get into second and then a lot of things can happen when you're behind one car. That's all it takes a place like this with all this aero. So at least we got out front and it was really we did what we had to do.”

Leach might’ve wondered if his motor’s tongue was hanging out, but in reality the open-competition powerplants are truly built to withstand wide-open racing, Daulton Wilson said.

“The running the wide-open part, it's not was hard on them,” said the driver for Kentucky-based JRR Motorsports. “If they get to running hot or whatever then that then that's the problem. Our Clements is running good and we ain't having no temperature problems last night as far as we went, so I don't think it's no harder on them than jumping through holes and and rod-checking them. As far as just holding them wide open, I don't think that ain't no harder on any other time.”

Flat-footing it can put a little pressure on the accelerator itself or the throttle linkage, English said.

“What happens is, like last night when it gets hammer down like that, and you start getting tight. You want more wheelspin, so your natural instinct is to push harder — even though you're all the way at the floor. You try to push harder to get more wheelspin to get the car freed up,” English said. "So you better have a good throttle-stop and a good linkage on there because you can you can bend (the linkage) … like I've bent we could just before just smashing as hard as I can. It'll flex. Like you once you get all the way to the bottom, it'll you'll push it further, but it ain't doing nothing.

“When I wanna go a little bit harder and I'm already on the floor, I always can feel that pedal flex even more. But sometimes your just natural instinct, when it's that fast and you get tight, you see people go in there and get like this,” English added, twisting his arms sideways. “You just know they're mashing as hard as they can mash, and probably going, too.”

When everyone’s hard on the gas, even burping the throttle can cost you time against the fastest drivers, Bruening said.

"This place here like on Saturday for the heat races, you'll be running wide open as hard as you can. You'll be out of breath after the first 10 or 15 laps. So the heat races are intense here, more so than almost the feature just because it's such a long race that you kind of get settled in and try to click off some laps,” the Iowan said. “A little mistake here is magnified quite a bit just because the track is so big and it's actually a very technical racetrack to make consistent fast laps. So yeah, you get up out of the groove or you push or you know somebody dictates the air in front of you a little bit, yeah, you can lose spots wholesale. This place here will magnify that.”

Running wide open out front is one thing. Doing it in traffic is another, Joiner said.

“Definitely in traffic, it changes the way you got to race, because if you're all right there bunched up with some folks, you can't really be wide open, because you got to judge yourself around the other cars. And it creates a lot of chaos there and you know, kind of puts you in a bind really,” Joiner said. “It's easiest to get this strung out and a few car lengths between each other and everybody winds up being the same speed because everybody's doing the same thing (and) everybody's got the same stuff, so it kind of all just evens out once you kind of get going and spread out, as long as nobody messes up or pushes up the hill or anything.

“But when you're all bunched up on the starts and restarts, it's certainly, especially down here in turn one, that's basically the whole race. It's whatever you can get there is setting you up for the rest of the event, especially like it is this weekend where it's just really, really fast. You’ve gotta get all you can get from turn four to turn one on the start.”

When your primary goal is going as fast as possible, staying on the throttle is the best way to do it, Joiner added.

“If you can stay with your foot on the floorboard and not scrub speed doing it, then you're just gonna go faster,” he said. “If you go in there and have to let off getting in the corner or something and get back in the fuel, you just cost yourself a tenth (of a second) or so. Basically, as fast as you can drive this thing, the faster you're gonna go.”

For Eldora drivers, mashing the gas around one of auto racing’s most historic tracks never gets old, Bruening said.

"I mean you kind of never get used to that sensation,” he said. “It’s part of why we do what we do, you know. We love it, right?”