FAIRBURY, Ill. (July 22) — Instant reaction and analysis from Wednesday’s 50-lap One for the Road feature at Fairbury Speedway, a $20,000-to-win FloRacing Night in America event captured by Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind. (RaceWire):
SUPERB KICKOFF: Wednesday would seem to indicate that having the World of Outlaws Late Model Series-sanctioned Prairie Dirt Classic begin with a FloRacing Night in America show has settled in well for Fairbury promoter Matt Curl. Everything about the midweek program has grown since its attachment to the PDC in 2024: the car count (65, 66, 73), the number of feature lead changes (two in ’24, three in ’25 and five this year), the crowd (the stands looked to be nearly filled on both sides of the track). While Wednesday’s headliner didn’t have a dramatic finish as Hudson O’Neal pulled away over the final circuits to win by 2.037 seconds, it was otherwise a classic FALS affair. On laps 14 and 15, O’Neal, Josh Rice and Shannon Babb — who would finish 1-3 — went three-wide for the lead; in the closing laps Rice, Babb, Jason Feger, Shannon Babb and Ricky Thornton Jr. were all in contention for second while weaving through lapped traffic. Babb knows the bullring as well as anyone, and he proclaimed that “Fairbury was really good tonight.”
DYNAMIC DUO: Put Hudson O’Neal in Kevin Rumley’s No. 6 and good things happen. The 25-year-old driver from Martinsville, Ind., has developed an uncanny symbiosis with the engineering wizard in their limited number of starts together — they might not win every race they run, but they’re probably going to be in the mix. As O’Neal raced to victory in Wednesday’s 50-lapper by mastering the middle lane around the quarter-mile oval and proving adept at blasting the top and circling the bottom when necessary, he rang up his seventh triumph among 13 top-five and 16 top-10 finishes in 18 starts this season with Rumley (his only races without a top-10 were DNQs due mechanical trouble). There’s no doubt that O’Neal established himself as a favorite for Saturday’s $50,000 PDC winner’s prize, which he’ll try to claim for the first time in his career. Rumley, of course, already has won the PDC with Jonathan Davenport (2015) and Kyle Larson (’21), so he’s bidding to become the first car owner to capture the event in its WoO era (since 2013) with three different drivers, supplanting Rocket1’s Mark Richards, who won the race with his son Josh Richards in 2016 and Brandon Sheppard in 2016, ’19 and ’22.
POINT OF CONTACT: Perhaps the driver with the best chance of outdueling O’Neal was Tyler Erb, who looked especially strong in advancing from the fifth starting spot to second by lap 27. He did it without being overly aggressive or pounding the cushion, giving him the appearance of a true contender for victory. But two circuits after reaching second, before he could begin challenging O’Neal, contact from Josh Rice sent Erb spinning in turn one. Rice took full blame for the incident; he said he misjudged his move entering turn one as Erb was drifting up the track and clipped Erb’s right-rear quarterpanel with the front of his left-side door, which was dented significantly from the impact. Erb took his frustrating banishment to the rear of the field — and ultimately a 23rd-place finish — with notable reserve, refraining from any harsh words toward Rice when I spoke with him afterward, though he did note that he now owes Rice one. And Rice said he would expect to “have one coming” from Erb, which left Rice noticeably subdued despite tallying a runner-up finish that was by far his best run ever at Fairbury.
RISING UP: I don’t think I was alone in feeling like Shannon Babb was about to pull off a vintage victory when he rallied after a lap-29 restart to overtake O’Neal for the lead on lap 34. All those fans in the backstretch bleachers who view the 52-year-old Babb as their homegrown hero certainly sensed a special moment brewing as well. Alas, the magic wasn’t there. A combination of Babb’s soft tires firing well following the restart and O’Neal briefly getting “lost” in the middle of the track allowed Babb to regain command of a race he had led for laps 1-9 and 16-21, but he couldn’t hold it as O’Neal went to the top and sailed back ahead on lap 37. Still, a third-place finish was satisfying for Babb. If he keeps up the speed he flashed on a night that didn’t exactly go smoothly — he had trouble changing a power steering pump after setting fast time — Babb could be a factor in Saturday’s 100-lapper, a race he won in 2013 but has failed to qualify for twice in the last four years, including last season.
STAT OF THE NIGHT: Wednesday marked the third straight year that the FloRacing Night in America-sanctioned One for the Road served as a lead-in to the Prairie Dirt Classic. The two previous feature winners — Bobby Pierce in 2025 and Ricky Thornton Jr. in ’24 — went on to finish sixth and 21st, respectively, in the 100-lap PDC finale that followed three days later.