MINERAL WELLS, W.Va. (Oct. 18) — Hudson O’Neal couldn’t hide his despair. Positive as he tried to be, the look on his face made it clear that he knew a major Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series victory — one of the biggest in Dirt Late Model racing — had slipped through his fingers.

Standing in street clothes Sunday inside his SSI Motorsports team’s trailer after finishing eighth in Carl Short’s 46th annual ARP Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway, the 26-year-old star from Martinsville, Ind., solemnly mourned his late-race encounter with a chunk of mud that damaged the right-front corner of his car enough to knock him from the lead.

“I hate to ever say that, you know, it was ours before the checkered flag flies because you don’t really know,” O’Neal said, his bright blue eyes flashing sadness. “But it was definitely going to be hard to outrun us I felt like.

“So, yeah,” he continued, shaking his head in frustration nine days after carburetor issues knocked him out of the series title chase at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. “I didn’t feel this type of heartbreak last week even when we saw the championship get away from us, because the championship, we weren’t leading, and it wasn’t necessarily ours yet.”

Saturday’s $100,000 DTWC prize was very much looking to be in O’Neal’s grasp. He started outside the front row in the 100-lapper coming off a $5,000 victory in Saturday’s second 25-lap semifeature and led 73 of the first 75 laps, only briefly ceding the top spot to eventual winner Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., for laps 33-34.

O’Neal’s Longhorn Chassis was fast. He proved it by quickly regaining command from Thornton, who would later say O’Neal “was definitely better.”

“He got under me and he actually cleared me at a time there,” O’Neal said of Thornton. “But I started pressing the gas just a little harder in that circumstance to try and get back clear of him because I knew if he got in front of me it was going to be tough to get back by him.”

All was going swimmingly well for O’Neal on the third-mile oval until the 75th circuit. After surging ahead to continue setting the race’s pace on a lap-74 restart, he found an obstacle suddenly appear in front of him when he returned to turn four and came charging off the top side of the track.

Right there, in his lane, was a thick ball of dirt. He spotted it too late to avoid it with an evasive move. It was like a deer had run out in front of him on the highway, leaving him no escape route.

“There was a mud clod off the cushion leaving four,” O’Neal recalled. “Just a foot off of it, and I seen it at the last second and I was centered up on it and I thought that I could miss it. I hit it, and then it rolled (the nose) under and then that’s what made me jump into the cushion (the next lap).

“I felt (a steering problem from the nose damage) getting into (turn) one, like, I got tight getting into one. And then whenever I got into (turn) three it was underneath of it and I couldn’t even think about turning.”

O’Neal’s car pushed up the track in turns three and four and its right-rear corner slapped the steel guardrail as Thornton raced underneath to grab the lead as lap 76 was scored. O’Neal began to slow when he reached turns one and two and completely fell off the pace entering turn three to bring out a caution flag.

When O’Neal pulled to the infield hot pit, his crew chief Jason Durham already had an inkling of what was wrong with the car. He just didn’t know exactly what had caused it.

“I could honestly say I didn’t see it,” Durham said O’Neal’s run-in with the mud clod. “I had a good idea something happened, though, because I thought I’d seen the flopper rolled under on the racetrack, or when he was coming in, and I felt like it had probably got under the right-front tire because he couldn’t steer.”

Durham “jerked (the flopper) back out” and he “got a bolt put in there through the bumper to try and hold it up there for whatever laps were left.” Other crew members changed both rear tires to give O’Neal fresh rubber and he rallied to finish eighth, but that was little solace in the wake of a bitter defeat.

O’Neal replayed the moment over and over in his mind, but there was no changing what had occurred. It was simply “one of those things,” he said, a twist of fate that doomed him.

“It was just somebody had hit (the chunk) and ran it down the racetrack,” O’Neal said. “And truthfully, Ricky was restarting out there (swinging wide off turn on the Delaware double-file restart), and whenever he ran around that cushion he might have hit it and knocked it down. It’s just a million things. I don’t really know how it got there.

“It’s not, you know, basketball-size, but it’s a good size, and those are the ones that tear floppers off and knock noses off and things. I didn’t really expect to see one here, that situation, but it was there. I just hit it with that flopper and it tore it off. I hit 50 of them throughout that race, maybe not that size or that direct spot, you know, but it just was … the right one.

“Call it a $100,000 mud clod, because I felt like I was out there and I was doing what I needed to do. I wasn’t really killing myself, but I was in a position where I was getting ready to start giving it what I had and try and finish it off.

“It’s hard to swallow,” he continued. “It's a tough one, and in $100,000 races, you don’t get in those positions every day, and whenever you do, you try to take advantage of them. I don’t know, I just got to keep my eyes open a little bit better in those circumstances. Maybe if I would have seen it a car length earlier there, maybe I could have avoided it.”

O’Neal paused. When he spoke again, he considered how the unfortunate break was an example of how his bid for the 2026 Lucas Oil Series title fizzled out down the stretch.

“We’ve been having a lot of speed at a lot of the places we go and it’s circumstances like this or issues like last week that took us out of contention,” said O’Neal, who settled for a third-place points finish worth $150,000. “Maybe I need to start living right, go to church, do something. Just wasn't meant to be. It’s a hard one to swallow, but it’ll make the next one that much better.”

O’Neal remarked that the “sting will wear off” and both him and his team will “be OK tomorrow.” But they’ll also never forget the year they experienced heartbreak at the DTWC.

“If you ask everybody in this pit area, they got these stories,” said O’Neal, who best finish in nine career DTWC starts is second, in 2023 at Eldora. “And this is our Dirt Track World Championship that got away from us.”