ZANESVILLE, Ohio (July 5) — Jonathan Davenport sensed something wasn’t quite right with his Double L Motorsports No. 49 machine in the last half of Saturday’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series feature at Muskingum County Speedway.

“I could tell something was wrong with my car,” said Davenport, who paced laps 9-43 before Hudson O’Neal passed him in traffic for the $25,000 victory. “The first part of the race was really, really good. I’m not going to elaborate on what I felt or what changed, but it was definitely different.”

As the Blairsville, Ga., veteran and Lucas Oil officials came to discover, his rear-travel limiter — the chain assembly that’s part of the so-called droop rule — wasn’t securely tightened in technical inspection after the 60-lapper. Though Davenport’s deck height met the parameters, the droop limiter chain not securely tightened which warranted “a droop infraction, and he was put to the tail for that,” series director Rick Schwallie said.

“Our chain wasn’t tight when we went to check our droop. Our droop, our deck height passed, but our chain wasn’t tight. It passed by a lot because we had less droop,” Davenport explained. “What happened was, basically, you have an underslung bar and rear-end housing. You have an axle tube that connects to the bail. Well, where it connects, you have bolts, you have four sets of bolts around it.

“One bolt on the bottom backed down and started hitting the underslung. So, basically, I had less droop, but it made the chain not be tight. I don’t even see how it stayed in there because it was so long, it was probably a half-inch bolt, I would say. It was backed all the way out, just enough to make the chain not really tight. It wasn’t dangling, but it wasn’t tight. So, yeah, just s----- luck. That’s the way it goes.”

Per the Lucas Oil rulebook, “the travel limiting chain including the compliance rubber must be installed so that when the car is jacked up from the rear and the chain assembly is tight” with no slack.

Davenport added that his car “felt odd” over the final laps, but that “when we ran up on lapped traffic there, our car was still pretty good, just got passed by Hudson.”

“Congratulations to him. He done a good job, I couldn’t get to him,” said Davenport, who added that “I’m glad the series enforces the rulebook” and that the loose droop limiter chain wasn’t intentionally orchestrated for any potential competitive advantages. 

If anything, Davenport felt that’s what hampered his finish. It was a 105-point swing for Davenport, who received 75 points for 25th as opposed to 180 for second. He’ll be 20 points behind Ricky Thornton Jr. heading into Thursday’s event at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa.

“All of this out here, we work with eighth-inch packers, 16th-inch packers, it’s all just a game of, not inches, it’s a game of eighths, sixteenths,” Davenport said. “When something like that changes a half inch, it totally changes the car. So, yeah, we can hit wheels and knock an eighth-inch of toe out, or a quarter-inch of toe and our car changes quite a bit. It’s one of those things that happened, we’ll write that down and make sure it never happens again.”