SARVER, Pa. (Aug. 29) — So many things went sideways in recent weeks for Garrett Alberson, a course correction to more positive results seemed inevitable.

Right?

The moment occurred Friday at Lernerville Speedway with Alberson driving to a flag-to-flag victory in the 40-lap Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series feature that kicked off the 57th Hillbilly Hundred, but he didn’t take for granted that a turnaround would come. The 36-year-old from Las Cruces, N.M., and his Roberts Motorsports crew made it happen.

After a series of frustrations — missteps three straight nights at the USA Nationals, a poor North-South 100 run, a car-crushing Topless 100 prelim punting from Cade Dillard, a subpar weekend at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway — Alberson needed to change his trajectory. He had one flourish in the middle of the stretch with an Aug. 7 semifeature win at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., but otherwise he was struggling to carry the momentum he gained on July 10 when he captured his first Lucas Oil Series A-main of 2025 at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa.

“Yeah, for sure,” Alberson said. “It's certainly, I mean, the whole last month-and-a-half or two months or whatever has been a lot more ups-and-downs and more drama than I care for. It seemed like we’ve had a hard time just closing it out in the last few weeks. Like we’ve had some speed at some point in the night most nights, but, I don’t know … 

“I think I’m probably a little hard-headed sometimes. Like, I’ve got a lot of ideas, and I try to follow them as far as I can, but, you know, we’ve been kind of riding that same boat here the last little bit, of like, qualify good, fade a little bit in the feature.”

So Alberson turned to the assistance of Vinny Guliani, the 38-year-old engineer/crew member-turned-technical consultant.

“I leaned real heavy on Vinny this weekend just to kind of get myself back on track,” Alberson said.

Alberson and Co. went back to the drawing board with the new Longhorn Chassis they debuted last weekend at Port Royal, where Alberson recorded pedestrian finishes of seventh and 13th one year after the half-mile oval was the site of his first-ever Lucas Oil Series victory.

“All week long, we had this whole car apart and basically built it from scratch,” Alberson said. “We built this one brand new after that Batesville (Motor Speedway) wreck (with Dillard on Aug. 15). We went to Longhorn (in China Grove, N.C.) — and big shout out to Longhorn and them guys, for sure, they really got a lot of stuff done for us — and we brought it out last weekend. And that was like the first weekend in a while I didn’t feel like we really had a lot of speed at any point in the night at a track that’s been decent for us. So I knew we had to just kind of like, you know, hit reset, kind of redo everything.

“We went over to (Pennsylvania Dirt Late Model racer) Logan Zarin’s shop (after Port Royal). They gave us all the space we needed to rip this thing apart. We had the deck out. We had everything out of this car. We rebuilt the whole thing and pretty much just did it Vinny’s way, so just massive shout out to Vinny for just being the man, you know what I mean? It just let me not be a setup guy for a week and just drive.”

Alberson’s Zach Huston-led crew also received his thanks.

“Big credit to the guys, because we’ve had, you know, some deep blows, cars getting wrecked, motors blown up, losing out on really good opportunities multiple times,” Alberson said. “There’s been some tough weeks, you know what I mean? Like, last week in particular, we went to Longhorn, built a new car after we had our best car beat up pretty bad (at Batesville), and then we go to Port Royal and struggle. And this week, I think, everyone was tired, but I was like, ‘No, we can’t stop. We got to rebuild this whole thing because we ain’t there yet.’

“At first I thought they were going to have a mutiny on me, but I think they understood the assignment, you know what I mean? And once we got digging into it, everybody come together and made stuff happen.”

Alberson went out and did his job behind the wheel as well. He was the fastest overall qualifier in the 40-car field, won his heat race and came off the outside pole to outgun Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., for the lead at the initial green flag and never looked back.

There were no hiccups from Alberson, no mistakes, no scrapes. He made all the right moves, including late in the distance when Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, who shot from fifth to second on a lap-26 restart, nosed underneath Alberson between turns one and two on lap 33.

Alberson said he definitely saw Moran’s car, though “actually, I think I misread who it was,” he said. “I thought it was (eventual fourth-place finisher) Timmy (McCreadie), because I knew that Timmy was close on one of the restarts and I seen white, so I kind of thought it was McCreadie, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, this bottom’s gotta be good. McCreadie’s down there.’

“And I moved down there and I felt OK,” he continued, noting that he went to the inside immediately that circuit in turns three and four. “Like, I could make a lot of time across the center, but I’d kind of like skate out to that grip strip down the front straightway, so I thought, Well, let me do that for a couple laps, just kind of shake it up a little bit. Then I felt like I wasn’t making great time like that, so I just tried to get back to what I was doing and refine it a little bit, kind of just try to keep my speed up, like, a lane off the top.

“In three and four the cushion was starting to crown over the edge and so I knew that could be a death trap if I did it wrong, so I was just trying to be smart. At an earlier point in the race, before one of them yellows, I started kind of like shearing it out to that cushion. I felt like I could blow over it really easily, so after that I kind of like reined it in and tried to be a little bit smoother with it.”

After turning back an early threat from Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga. — June’s Firecracker 100 at Lernerville who fell from second to fifth on the lap-26 restart and ultimately finished seventh — Alberson beat Moran to the finish line by 0.852 of a second. The 30-year-old Moran gave Alberson his praise for closing out the race strong and breaking through for a $10,000 victory after his recent tribulations.

“I showed him the nose, and once I did, he just moved down probably four or five car lengths, and it just took the air off my car,” Moran said. “And it messed me up for a lap, so I had to get a rhythm going again and fell back a little bit. It just took a little too long to get back up through there.

“It's not easy out here on the road and Garrett’s definitely one of the good guys. So, yeah, it is good to see him win, and I’m sure he’s pretty pumped.”

Alberson was indeed smiling broadly as he signed autographs for fans and received congratulatory handshakes during the postrace technical inspection at the Lucas Oil Series operations trailer. There was a sense of relief and satisfaction in his demeanor — not surprising after he found that elusive elixir of confidence and experience to put one of the most trying periods of his career behind him.

“You’re like, ‘All right, I got a set up under this thing that should win races, because the guy’s way smarter than me that put it in there, so as long as I don’t give up and just hammer at it …’” Alberson said. “But it seems like so many times nowadays, just staying hammered at it seems to be the ticket. You know, growing up, especially out in the Southwest, it was like, whoever could be the straightest and smoothest, never miss lane or something like that, would win the race. Growing up, it was always, like, you slow down for the feature. But now, you don’t slow down hardly. I'm still adapting to that I think sometimes, trying not to like fall into that rut of slowing the car down whenever I need to.

“But I felt confidence in the car. I told myself before the race, ‘You’re going to have to feel OK being uncomfortable,’ because the whole setup was a little bit different than what I’ve done in a while. And I knew I was going to have to be out there on the top, you know, kind of on the edge, and make some happen.”

Alberson was perfect this time. No one understands more than him how difficult that is in the highly competitive world of Dirt Late Model racing.

“That’s one thing the casual observer may not, you know, understand sometimes — like every one of these teams has really smart people on it, and every one of these drivers has thought about this for decades,” Alberson said. “It’s all we think about, you know, so it’s really hard to lead these races and even harder to win them.”