UNION, Ky. — Just as Brandon Overton was feeling especially positive about the trajectory of his frustrating 2025 season, the start of Saturday’s 43rd annual Sunoco North-South 100 at Florence Speedway blew his good vibes away.

Not just figuratively. Overton literally watched the hood of his Riggs Motorsports Longhorn Factory Team car fly off the car entering turn one of the half-mile oval.

“I mean, that’s just how my year’s been,” Overton said, shaking his head in exasperation while interacting with a couple little kids in the pit area after the race. “It’s just the way my luck’s been going. You can’t make this up.”

Overton, 34, of Evans, Ga., had to go to the rear of the 26-car field after his crew repined the hood during the opening-lap caution flag that his problem triggered, relinquishing his prime fourth starting spot. He salvaged a respectable eighth-place finish from the rear, but it was far from a satisfying outcome for the event’s 2021 winner.

While Overton cracked that over his career he’s “had the hood fly off, wheels fall off, the damn steering wheel fall off” among other things, he’s never experienced such a development at the start of a $75,000-to-win crown jewel race that he appeared to have a legitimate shot at capturing. Making it even worse, he was confident in his race car, a fact he hasn’t been able to claim often amid his subpar initial season as the driver of the Longhorn Chassis house car.

“This is probably the most speed we've had since we’ve been together,” said Overton, who the previous weekend finished ninth in the USA Nationals at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis., ahead of second- and third-place finishes in Florence semifeatures. “I felt like we were really good in the feature at Cedar Lake … I just kind of abused my tires to get up there (into the top five), and a late restart kind of cost us. We come here and we’re fast both days, and we’re just barely tweaking on it, trying not to mess it up.

“Then we’re all worried about this heat tonight, right? So, like, literally, I’m sitting out there lined up (for the first heat) just praying, like, ‘Please, something go my way.’ You know what I mean? And I get a good start, win the heat and start us fourth. So I’m already satisfied. I’m thinking gonna hover around top five, that’s where I felt like I was going to run.

“And then I took the green, mashed the gas, I’m going down the front straightaway and the hood blows off,” he continued. “It slid back a little bit. I seen it and I was like, ‘Oh, boy.’ And then it flew off and I was like, ‘Oh man.’ ”

Overton’s black hood sailed high into the air above the charging field. It came back to earth on the racetrack but fortunately wasn’t run over and mangled by any other cars, allowing officials to return it to Overton’s crew so they could place it back on his machine when he came onto pit road in the infield.

It was pretty clear what caused the hood to fly off. Overton’s crew chief, Anthony Burroughs, joked that it “just blew off,” but he admitted that the hood pins weren’t locked into place and he took responsibility for the critical mistake.

Florence is a racy track on which starting position doesn’t kill a driver’s hopes — race winner Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., in fact, started 14th — so Overton didn’t count himself out after being forced to the rear, but he knew climbing all the way back to the front would be challenging.

“It’s just the way it is,” Overton said. “I was trying to not kill my tires. When I went to the back, I said, ‘It’s OK, just sit around. I’m sure we’re going to have a bunch of cautions. Don’t burn my tires. So if I do get up there in the end, I’ll have something to kind of race with them.’ ”

Overton didn’t have quite enough in his No. 76 to get all the way into contention. He cracked the top 10 shortly after the halfway mark, but then settled into the position during the long green-flag stretch from laps 52-92. The late restart gave him the opportunity to move up to seventh on lap 95 before he lost the spot to Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., heading to the white flag and settled for eighth.

“I think like our car was pretty good around the bottom,” said Overton, who tallied his seventh top-10 finish in 10 career North-South 100 feature starts. “It was hard for me to move out. Like, our car wasn’t right to run the middle or top. I would get kind of hung in the cushion, so it is what it is.”

Overton tried to brush off the hood incident and look at the bright side of his overall weekend performance, which seemed to indicate that he’s improving in the seat of Longhorn’s flagship machine. His struggles have certainly been one of the most surprising developments of the 2025 Dirt Late Model campaign. His ledger shows just three victories — including just one on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series, on May 2 at Circle City Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind. — and he’s seventh in the national tour’s standings, a massive 475 points in arrears of the fourth playoff spot with a modest nine top-five and 24 top-10 finishes in 34 feature starts.

This hasn’t been the season that Overton or anyone with his team expected, but he sees brighter days ahead.

“We’re getting better,” said Overton, whose last top-five finish in a full-field event is a third in July 10’s Lucas Oil show at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa. “I mean, we are, as bad as it looks. Like we are getting better. We’re all getting along more. We’re going to be all right.”

The team heads to Batesville Motor Speedway in Locust Grove, Ark., for the weekend’s $50,000-to-win Topless 100.

“We go to Batesville next. I mean, I love Batesville. I’m from the South,” Overton said. “We got a lot of places coming up that I like, so we’ll we all right.”