The five-race playoff for the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series launched Friday at Brownstown Speedway, but it wasn’t one of the four Big River Steel Chase for the Championship drivers that landed in victory lane.

Instead it was an interloper, Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., sneaking away with his first career victory on the national tour with a $10,000 C.J. Rayburn Memorial triumph at the historic quarter-mile oval. | RaceWire

“I kinda spoiled their party,” the 33-year-old World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series regular said in the tech inspection area after leading the final 12 laps of the 40-lap feature to become the tour’s 94th all-time winner.

No one questions Hoffman’s bona fides, which include contending for WoO championships each of the last two seasons and earlier this year posting third-place finishes at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway in arguably the sport’s biggest events, the Dream and World 100. But he knows the Brownstown victory, which came one night ahead of the $50,000-to-win Jackson 100, marks another notch in the steering wheel.

“I had never won a Lucas race, so that always kind of hung over my head and kind of eluded me just a little bit. Yeah, it’s really special,” he said. “They always say once you get your first one they all come easier, so hopefully that's the case here.”

If Hoffman is to win Saturday’s lucrative weekend finale, it’s unlikely to follow Friday’s script with Lucas Oil’s vaunted Big Four having a flurry of trouble including a flat tire while leading (Hoffman’s buddy Jonathan Davenport, who later endured a spin), an early scrape between the first- and third-place drivers in series points (fourth-finishing Ricky Thornton Jr. and Hudson O’Neal, who retired with right-front damage) and a subpar qualifying effort (Devin Moran rebounded to finish third in the main event).

But Brownstown has been fertile territory for Hoffman, whose Tye Twarog Racing team grabbed a WoO victory at the Jackson County Fairgrounds oval last season. He’s also won a couple modified races at Brownstown and, in the budding days of his Late Model career, logged a career-best fifth-place finish in the Jackson 100 in 2019 driving the Jones Oil entry.

“I like the track. It's one of my favorite places to come to,” Hoffman said. “I could have took this weekend off obviously, but a lot of money up here and this race here being for C.J. is really neat, too. It's kind of special to me since I'm a chassis builder myself.”

He called his winning hardware, topped with a miniature version of a classic race car driven by the Hall of Famer Rayburn, “probably the coolest trophy that I'm going to have until I can win a crown jewel or something like that. As far as my collection right now, that's pretty dang cool.”

Hoffman started outside the second row in the main event, but he didn’t make up any ground while Davenport was dominating the first nine laps before the leader's flat tire forced him to the infield pits for fresh rubber.

Things opened up for Hoffman thereafter, and he settled into second behind Brandon Sheppard’s Rocket Chassis house car. After the flurry of early cautions, a longer green-flag run forced the frontrunners to face lapped traffic, and that’s when Hoffman made his winning move around Sheppard down the frontstretch with 12 laps remaining.

“Brandon was kind of a sitting duck leading, just because he was out there,” Hoffman said. “He didn’t really know where to be, and I started running a little bit higher than he was and making speed so that was, at the end of the day, how I got to the lead.”

The problem Sheppard had with traffic soon became Hoffman’s problem.

“Then once we got to lapped traffic, it gets difficult again because I've got a lot of guys kind of changing lanes and crossing your air,” Hoffman said. “And even though it's a pretty small bullring, it still will affect (the car) quite a bit so I chose the wrong lane a couple of times, almost gave it up. He almost beat me back to the line there at the end.”

Hoffman held on to win by eight-hundredths of a second in a tight finish.

“I just chose the wrong lane a couple of times and I didn't know which direction Sheppy was coming from, and obviously it was on the bottom,” the winner said. “I just didn’t know where to defend from, so I was just trying to use as much racetrack as I could because I felt like at that point then I was the sitting duck.”

Hoffman is eager to take a crack at duplicating his feat in Saturday’s long-distance race, whose winner’s list is a Who’s Who of Hall of Fame drivers and the sport’s current best racers.

"I like the longer races. The racetrack typically slows down more. You get guys that come and go a lot more, and as long as you just put yourself in position late in the race there, you'll be fine,” Hoffman said. “I ran this Jackson 100 quite a few times (and) we've had speed here in that 100-lapper. So now I have just a lot more confidence one, but also just a lot more knowledge of what to do in these 100-lappers. There's so much that goes into, doing that whole 100 laps.”