ROSSBURG, Ohio (June 7) — Saturday’s Dream XXXI finale at Eldora Speedway was 22 laps old and Jonathan Davenport still sat in 13th place — exactly where he had started the 100-lap race.

There was nothing eye-catching about Davenport’s performance through what was nearly the first quarter of the race. There was no indication that he had the goods to win the event’s six-figure top prize for a record-tying third consecutive time. He seemed stuck in place.

But in that nondescript opening stanza lies the Eldora genius of the 41-year-old superstar from Blairsville, Ga. He knows when to go and when to go slow, and it’s why he once again rose up when necessary and had plenty of equipment and tire left under him to carry him to a fourth career Dream and 11th overall major-event victory at the famed high-banked, half-mile oval.

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“Anytime those dirt crumbs are moving in that grit (early in a race on a reconditioned surface), and you’re sliding on them and you’re spinning through them, you’re hurting your tires,” Davenport said. “I was just waiting for it to slow down. Eventually, I knew it would. I didn’t think it was going to get that slick for as much as (the track-prep crew) did to it, but obviously it had a really, really hard base.

“The racetrack wasn’t as aggressive as what I thought it was gonna be, or, Bobby (Pierce) and Nick (Hoffman) and Josh (Rice) and Hudson (O’Neal) and all the good guys didn’t make me have to run that aggressive.”

Indeed, Davenport ran “the whole first 22 laps around the bottom just pacing there,” and then a caution flag set up a restart that inexplicably allowed him to vault into contention without even having to force the issue. His bottom lane simply opened wide for him to immediately pick up five spots in one circuit and crack the top five on lap 27.

It was the beginning of the end for Davenport’s competition. He kept chugging right to the front, overtaking polesitter Shane Clanton of Zebulon, Ga., for second on lap 33 and then gliding past race-long pacesetter Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga., for the lead on lap 40 following a restart.

“So I seen Bobby move out (to run the top during the early stages) and I seen (Ricky) Thornton (Jr.) move out and a couple other people, and they would kind of migrate back to the bottom,” Davenport said. “But as soon as that caution came out (on lap 22), all those guys forgot about the bottom, so they all started running the middle to the top and I just cruised right around the bottom there. And before I knew it, I was like fourth or fifth, so I kind of surprised myself there.”

The greatest driver of his generation at Eldora proceeded to stamp his name all over the Dream. He was never threatened once in command, driving away to arguably the most dominant of his bushel-full of long-distance triumphs at the place built by the late Earl Baltes and now owned by former NASCAR Cup Series champion Tony Stewart.

Remember last year when Davenport won the Dream with a margin of just over five seconds on Pierce? He doubled that Saturday, crossing the finish line 10.135 seconds — roughly half of a lap — ahead of (again) Pierce, who had to rally from the rear over the race’s second after a deflating tire forced him to pit on lap 48 just as he had reached second place.

The 28-year-old Pierce mused afterward that “it would have been exciting” if a caution flag had tightened the field after he returned to second on lap 92 because he had changed both his rear tires on his mid-race pit stop, but he understood he would have still only had a puncher’s chance of downing Davenport. Pierce acknowledged that no one in the field was capable of negotiating the Eldora layout like Davenport.

“So Jonathan says people forgot about the bottom” on the lap-22 restart, Pierce said while sitting alongside Davenport at a desk in the media center during the postrace press conference for the race’s top-three finishers. He paused, and then added while glancing toward Davenport: “I don’t think we forgot. We just couldn't do it like you did.”

“I did follow him when he passed me at that portion of the race,” continued Pierce, a three-time crown jewel winner at Eldora who entered the weekend having one the track’s last two majors in 2024 (World 100 and Dirt Track World Championship). “I got off the top, and by then my tires were probably jumk so I couldn't really stick the line like he could.”

Other drivers Davenport vanquished during his sudden explosion forward were left in awe of his Eldora prowess.

“Man, he come by me, and it was like I was sitting still,” said Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky., who finished ninth after joining Davenport as a $30,000 preliminary feature winner the previous night. “I tried following him in on that bottom and he was on railroad tracks compared to me. His car was just good. I was in the same tire tracks as he was his and stuff was really good. Obviously, I mean, he went straight to the front.”

Clanton, who ran in the top five most of the race’s first half before fading to an 11th-place finish, simply tipped his cap — or helmet, in the case — to Davenport.

“He’s no different from the past five times or whatever he’s been here,” Clanton said. “Any guy that can enter in the middle and turn left and leave in the bottom and make that straightaway that much longer instead of a big circle, you got a good race car.

“There ain’t another car here that could do that. Bobby and them could hit the cushion and come back off of it, but nothing like (Davenport). He’s in the middle of the racetrack and just turned left and exited in the bottom.”

What was Clanton’s reaction when Davenport motored by him for second place?

“Ah, s---,’ ” Clanton said with a grin. “There’s the winner. If he don’t blow a motor, that’s the winner.”

Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, never ran in front of Davenport while advancing from the 24th starting spot to a fifth-place finish, but he briefly reached second on laps 67-68 following a restart so he at least caught a glimpse of the winner. When asked if anyone else can run Eldora’s lower lane as expertly as Davenport, Moran could only single out a Hall of Fame driver who ran his last Eldora race last June before perishing in a vintage plane accident a few months later.

“Scott (Bloomquist), back in the day, that’s about it,” Moran said of the late eight-time Dream and 12-time crown jewel winner at Eldora. “(Davenport) just has a feel for a car and knows what he needs and what he wants and he’s got it figured out. On that one restart I got to his quarterpanel, but then he could just drove down the backstretch right away and he was checked out from there.”

The legendary Bloomquist’s name continually came up in postrace assessments of Davenport’s latest Eldora conquest. That’s no surprise, of course, considering their similar styles and that Davenport is now just two crown jewel victories behind Bloomquist’s all-time mark of an even dozen.

Pierce remarked that Davenport’s Eldora approach “is a lot like Scott, I’d say, you know, (running) through the middle. They’re able to, you know, just kind of make the bottom-middle work where a lot of other people can’t.”

“Well, that's J.D at Eldora. That’s Bloomquist at Eldora,” Pierce’s father and crew chief, Bob Pierce, said. “His deal, he’s copied Bloomquist’s line like almost to a T. And see, you gotta do different stuff to your car (to run that way). I’d say he’s got a little bit more gear, like a little more RPM, because it does slow down, so I think from Point A to Point B, that way he’s got a little more squirt. And, you know, he drives the car really super straight.”

Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., sitting to Davenport’s left during the press conference following his third-place finish, put the winner right up in Eldora’s hierarchy with Bloomquist and eight-time crown jewel winner Billy Moyer.

“You’re just witnessing dominance again like, you know, Scott always did and Billy … he’s just so good here,” Hoffman said. “Any of these places where he can come down the hill and make speed down the straightaway, I feel like that’s his best racetracks, and this is one of those that, obviously he’s the best at.”

One observer who has an even deeper appreciation for Davenport’s talent was standing by Davenport’s Double L Motorsports trailer following the race. That was Kevin Rumley, the engineering guru who turned the wrenches on his late father Lee Roy’s No. 6 that Davenport drove to his first-ever crown jewel victory — at Eldora and in general — in 2015’s Dream.

Rumley isn't surprised Davenport has developed into an all-time great, particularly at Eldora.

“I believed in him very strongly when he won the first one, and I kind of knew what was going to happen,” Rumley said while leaning against Davenport’s pit box. “He’s so good here, and he studies it all the time. He studies every lap. He studies his tires very well; he knows exactly how hard to go with them. He’s really an Eldora expert. If there’s no cushion there, everybody’s had a bad day.

“Yeah, it’s going to keep going for a long time,” he added, forecasting even more doom for Davenport’s rivals in the years ahead. “He’s going to win a lot more here.”

Rumley sees Davenport as possessing a perfect blend of “confidence and maturity” for Eldora, and he’s grown even better in recent years because he’s settled in to run the same 2021-vintage Longhorn Chassis car in every crown jewel event at the track since he drove it to victory in the second of 2021’s double World 100s. Six of his 10 crown jewel triumphs at the track have come behind the wheel of the machine he calls “Eldora,” which just continues to run at an elite level.

“His dream was always to have an Eldora car where he only runs it hear and he could use the same notebook over and over again,” Rumley said. “There’s no practice here for 100 laps, right? So if you can keep the same notebook of the same car and run it over and over and over, you can make a very tough day for everyone.”

Rumley also pointed out that there’s one other secret to Davenport’s success at the Big E.

“He loves this place,” Rumley said. “And for Eldora to love you, you have to love Eldora.”

Davenport wouldn’t disagree with Rumley’s statement. There’s no track Davenport holds closer to his heart than Eldora, a fact he’s repeated ad nauseam during his decade-long assault on the track’s record books.

“This place is awesome,” Davenport said. “It’s a process. It ain’t just a race. This is an event. You gotta qualify, heat race, race, and then you gotta heat race again, hit the inverts, and then hit the inverts again. There’s just so much you gotta overcome here.

“But the good thing is, this place is a wide enough, and they do such a great job with the track prep that if you have the best race car, you can normally win here.”

Saturday actually proved Davenport’s review of Eldora as he came from midpack to bag the $100,000 triumph, marking just the second time in his 11 major-event wins (five World 100s, four Dreams, the 2022 Eldora Million and 2020’s Covid-year, non-crown jewel Intercontinental Classic invitational) that he’s started in double digits. His only victory from deeper in the field was his first World 100 in 2015 when he started 18th.

Davenport’s performance at Eldora has become so sublime— he’s just the second driver to win three straight Dreams alongside Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., and his 10 crown jewel triumphs have come over a decade versus the 31-year period (1988-2019) in which Bloomquist accumulated his 12 such wins — that he has to sheepishly address whether he’s so dominant that he might be “ruining” the show at Eldora, which DirtonDirt’s Michael Rigby asked him during the press conference.

“No, I’m not ruining Eldora,” Davenport said. “It’s just, everything worked in my favor tonight, and these two (Pierce and Hoffman) had bad luck. Obviously, they was really good coming from the back of the field. I don’t know if I could have done that if I went back there.”

Davenport is likely being modest when one considers how strong his Lance Landers-owned car was, but it’s hard for a low-key guy like J.D. to just accept such adulation. When Rigsby also asked Davenport about officially being in Eldora’s top-three pantheon with Bloomquist and Moyer, he offered a similar response.

“I just can’t believe somebody would, like, put my name with with those three, as good as they’ve been, as dominant as they’ve been,” Davenport said. “I just feel very fortunate to to have done what I have done. I don’t know if it’s part luck, part skill, or just having great car owners through the years, and having, you know, parents that always drove me … my dad, you know, he always pushed me to the limits all the time.

“So yeah, definitely awesome. Thank you for saying that for sure,” he added, nodding toward Rigsby. “I don’t feel like I’m there, but it is nice being in that conversation.”

Davenport isn’t ready for Eldora gravy train to end either.

“I mean, eventually, you know, I’m not gonna be able to keep up with these guys,” Davenport said. “It’s getting harder and harder, but then, you know, look at the front row tonight (comprised of veterans Clanton and Dale McDowell). Dale is, what, 59? And I’m like, ‘There’s no way I'm gonna do this for 17 more years.’ That’s crazy he can do this that long and be that good.

“I think I still got a few more ice cream seasons in me,” he added with a smile, “but not too many more.”