ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 6) — Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., was smiling for photos with a long line of fans still visiting him well after the World 100 ended at Eldora Speedway, but underneath the friendly demeanor he was boiling. He couldn’t wave away a frustrating performance that saw him start 27th and never seriously contend en route to a ninth-place finish

“We come here to try to win, and I’m not happy with a ninth place,” said Pierce, who last year won the World 100 for the second time in his career. “I wouldn’t be happy with a third place or a second. I wanna win.”

Back-to-back victories in Dirt Late Model racing’s most prestigious race was never really on the table for Pierce. He ran well in the weekend’s preliminaries with 25-lap semifeature finishes of third on Thursday and second on Friday, but he never got rolling in the finale. In fact, after a seventh-place finish in his heat, he had to make a late-race move in the first B-main just to secure the fourth and final transfer spot — without the pass he would have been watching the 100-lapper from the pits because the two points provisionals were already taken — and he didn’t crack the top 10 in the feature lap 89.

“We got started way behind the 8-ball,” Pierce said. “Had a bad draw, I guess you call it, with the (heat) invert, starting fifth in that first heat, and the car wasn’t good so we finished seventh in the heat race, couldn’t go anywhere. Luckily we made it to the B-main and scratched and clawed our way to get through there (to qualify), then the feature rolled around and the racetrack was … it was there, just not quite enough up there (at the top) to really make the big gains.

“So I got up to sixth or seventh at one point and fell back to ninth at the very end (losing two spots over the final three laps). We’ll take it, move on, and maybe get better the next time. We gotta get a better start in our heat race.”

Pierce, 28, did start the World 100 finale for the 12th time in his 13 attempts since 2013, a statistic he called “pretty cool.” The only time he was absent from the feature in his career was in 2021 when he was suspended from competing in the first of the year’s double World 100s because a crew member’s altercation with a track official during the overnight hours between the preliminary and main-event programs.

The World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series points leader offered his congratulations to race winner Ricky Thornton Jr., who impressed Pierce with his run to victory.

“That was kind of surprising because, you know, J.D. (Jonathan Davenport) and (Dale) McDowell were up there at times and he still won it,” Pierce said. 

Leftover World 100 Notes

• The sixth-place finish Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., recorded in the Rocket Chassis house car matched his career-best in the World 100 (he also sixth in 2021’s second World 100). A Dream winner in 2019, the 32-year-old is still searching for his first top-five finish in 12 career World 100 feature starts.
• Garrett Alberson of Las Cruces, N.M., retired on lap 41 with a broken left-front shock mount sustained in a backstretch collision with Bobby Pierce.
• Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky., was the race’s first retiree, pulling off on lap 11 with substantial damage to his car’s rear deck for a short outing in his fourth consecutive World 100 feature appearance.
• Drake Troutman of Hyndman, Pa., said he “totally missed the setup” in his first World 100 finale start, but 18th-place finish earned him a $3,000 bonus as the Shane Unger Memorial Rookie of the Race.
• Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., had his Briggs Transport car with its tribute wrap to his late father Barefoot Bob McCreadie up to eighth after a lap-37 pit stop to change a right-rear tire when smoke on lap 88 signaled terminal mechanical woes.
• Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., looked like a contender when he marched from the seventh starting spot to third by lap eight, but he fell from the spot on the 22nd circuit and just kept going in the wrong direction. The former World 100 winner was eighth when he pitted his Longhorn Factory Team car on lap 37 for a tire change that didn’t improve his performance, prompting him to retire on 70 while running 19th for a 23rd-place finish.
• Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., who won the World 100 in 2023, started 25th after qualifying through a B-main and never climbed higher than 22nd before retiring on lap 54 because his “car just never felt right.” He was already lapped when he retired in 25th.
• Four chassis brands were represented among the top five: Two Longhorns (winner Ricky Thornton Jr. and third-place Nick Hoffman), a Team Zero (runner-up Dale McDowell), a Rocket (fourth-place Tyler Erb) and an Infinity (fifth-place Ryan Gustin).