An antsy Mark Richards returned to Rocket Chassis headquarters in Shinnston, W.Va., following June 21’s Firecracker 100 at Lernerville Speedway ready to get to work. Stewing on an exhaustive list of ideas long enough, the 64-year-old called for a midseason overhaul.

“I came home from Lernerville and I said, ‘We’re building a car,’ ” Richards said after July 15’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series feature at Shelby County Speedway in Harlan, Iowa.

The fruits of Richards’s labor have been noticeable since the Dirt Late Model Hall of Famer regrouped his once-struggling Rocket1 Racing team.

With Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., recording a pair of wins, three runner-ups and seven total podium finishes in the last 11 races — all since a triumphant debut in their new car July 4 at Atomic Speedway near Chillicothe, Ohio — the Rocket Chassis house car team is starting to look more and more like their front-running selves from their ultra-successful stint together from 2017-22.

“I’m very comfortable, especially in this new car right now,” said Sheppard, who looked ever-steady in his 12th-to-second finish July 15 at Shelby County. “It’s been good everywhere we’ve been, just maneuverable. I feel like we have a good baseline where we unload and can be good anywhere we go right now. Only time will tell that, though.”

Sheppard’s temperance stems not from a lack of confidence in his Rocket1 Racing team, but from being pragmatic. The upper echelons of the sport are tighter than ever in Sheppard’s eyes — “It’s hard to be up there right now,” he said — with Bobby Pierce, Ricky Thornton Jr., Jonathan Davenport and Devin Moran, among others, upping their games and programs in recent years.

Factor in Hoosier’s NLMT tire that debuted in 2023, rule changes (including the droop rule) and ever-evolving technology, and there’s much Sheppard and Richards have had to adapt to since their last stretch racing together. But so far, so very good.

“Overall, I think it’s just a solid piece, really,” Sheppard said of the new car. “I know it’s better than the other cars, it’s just been very forgiving. And the car has reacted well to the changes. It’s just been really good. I can’t thank Mark and the guys enough for the opportunity to drive it again, and the opportunity to be behind the wheel of a new piece.

“I’m just doing the best job I can to hopefully, you know, consistently make that happen. But that’s a hard thing to do in this sport, is to consistently be up front.”

So what’s exactly new on Richards’s latest chassis design? For starters, he isn’t calling it the XR1.3, but he will say, it’s a lot different than the XR1.2 he unveiled last July 22. Richards claimed in an interview last August after their Topless 100 win with Tim McCreadie that he hadn’t totally redesigned a chassis since the XR1’s debuted in 2015. Building race cars since the 1980s, Richards has learned “these cars run at about a 10-year cycle.”

But even after his redesign for the next XR1 incarnation last summer, Richards felt urgency to make additional wholesale changes to his company’s chassis. Without giving too many details away, Richards says this new-version XR1 “has got probably a lot of stuff the car before the XR1 had.”

“That's all I'm gonna say,” Richards said. “It ain’t clear back there, but there's some ideas.”

Moving around and bolstering the car’s safety was a priority as well. Richards likes to think he and his team have executed that soundly.

“There's some safety things that needed to be fixed, and we fixed all that,” Richards said. “You know, I feel like right now we've got probably, if not, the safest car. It’s right there in the pit area, (in terms of being the safest car), which it was some stuff I'd been wanting to do for a while. We just took the time to do it.”

The two-week Lucas Oil hiatus from June 21’s Firecracker 100 to July 4’s program at Atomic was likely the last week-plus break for the Rocket1 team, so if Richards was going to do something, that was the timeframe.

Though it meant he’d have to re-adjust himself to a new chassis design, Sheppard was on board when Richards made that executive decision.

“It was one of them deals where it was a spur of the moment. It was, ‘Alright, we need to sit down,’” Sheppard said. “Mark was like, ‘All right, look, now’s the time to do something. It’s either s--- or get off the pot.’ The guys at the shop put their heads together and built the best thing they thought they could. And it’s been working out.”

Joel Rogers, a longtime Rocket1 crewman, said Richards “built that car in three days.” Richards added he can’t take credit for the new car’s design, as it’s a makeover of the XR1 foundation with older concepts, innovative wrinkles and more tailored to Sheppard’s liking.

And although he’s been retired from full-time racing since the end of 2022, ideas from Richards's son, five-time national champ Josh Richards, are incorporated as well. Richards tested with Sheppard and the Rocket1 team on June 16 at Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio, where the elder Richards learned more about where his XR1.2 cars need improvements.

“Josh definitely helped with this car,” Richards said. “Him and I talk often.”

Richards and team actually never tested their new car before July 4’s debut at Atomic. Though the 3/8-mile was rough-and-tumble and caused many mechanical failures, Richards and Sheppard had no worries.

“Not a bit, no,” Richards said. “We smile when it's rough. We felt confident enough that we didn’t have to go test. It's a big change from where we were.”

Richards also sounded off on critics, skeptics and keyboard warriors accusing him and his enterprise of creating copycat chassis versions of competing brands.

“I don't give a f--- what they think, and you can write that,” Richards said. “We didn't copy Longhorn (Chassis). … I've been in business since 1986 there, OK? And I was in business since 1978 with Rodney Combs at WRC. So there were some copying that went on then.”

Richards has been around long enough to know chassis builders, especially competitors, learn from each other, which he knows is acceptable. He reaches his wits end when he sees claims on social media questioning his integrity.

“Listen, I don’t have a problem with (chassis builders evolving and learning from competing chassis builders), but they say we’re copying when actually we weren’t,” Richards said. “We weren't the ones doing it. When the XR1 came out, everybody said Kevin Rumley designed it, and that was a bunch of bulls---. He did not have nothing to do with the design of that car, nothing. 

“I don't give a f--- what's on social media. Because most of the people on social media have nothing to do with these cars.”

Richards and Co. will be especially busy the rest of 2025 on the car-building front as his Rocket enterprise has “30 cars to build” for customers awaiting the latest-version XR1. Richards said that Ridgely, W.Va.’s Matt Cosner is the only other driver to currently possess the newly-designed car. 

Cosner actually finished second last Saturday at Hagerstown (Md.) Speedway in his first race with the car, a night he set fast time and finished runner-up to Pennsylvania dominator and Rocket stalwart Gregg Satterlee.

“We built this and now we got it, and we're racing, and we got a whole bunch of ‘em to build at the shop,” Richards said. “We’ll get our customers back where they need to be, and we go from there.”

Richards has been the asked question countless times, and he likely will until it’s conclusive, but does he sense this as the beginning of Rocket1’s definitive return to prominence? 

“I don't know, we'll see,” Richards said after July 15's Lucas Oil show at Shelby County. “This thing’s raced six times, and it's won twice and two times on the podium at Muskingum and (Shelby County), and the other two nights, it would have been better if we wouldn't have screwed it up. But that was on us.”

He does know this: “Everything's coming together.”

“You know, it’s been a lot of stuff that's went along in the past two years and getting Shepp back comfortable, drivers drive different,” Richards said. “We’re getting him back to what he's comfortable with and not worrying about what everybody else is saying.”

For Sheppard, he’s especially pleased with the newer car on longer runs, which bodes well with longer-distance races coming up. He won July 12’s Diamond Nationals at Lucas Oil Speedway convincingly from sixth and nearly snookered Pierce in his 12th-to-second charge July 15 at Shelby County if not for a series of late yellows. 

The team did backslide July 10 at Iowa’s 34 Raceway (fourth to ninth) and July 11 at Lucas Oil Speedway (fifth to 10th), and faded from the pole of July 5’s Lucas Oil event at Muskingum County to finish third, but if those are off nights for the team, the future is bright.

“I feel like my car is good, especially on the longer runs,” Sheppard said. “I feel consistent, I feel like I have a good balance, can steer good in the slick. Everything just feels really good right now. I feel like we can be there at the end of a long race. It’s just a matter of getting myself in the position to be there at the end of a long race.

“Really, it’s just a balance thing. Consistently making your car balanced is tough. Anytime you can make your window bigger for consistency, it’s going to be better. As I said, that’s all we can do. It’s super hard to consistently keep it up front. That’s the thing for me, building consistency. 

“And consistency is going to bring wins or, just, like I said, you run up front, and eventually things are going to go your way. Consistency is a huge key to being on top of the sport and being successful. First, second, third, as long as you’re in that top-five every night, things are going to go your way sometimes. You have to do the best you can to keep it that way. That’s all you can do.”