ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 7) — His disabled Kryptonite Race Car sitting in the Eldora Speedway infield while Mike Marlar was heading for a 20-lap Chasing the Dream victory, Freddie Carpenter wanted to slip out of the top half of his firesuit.

Unable to easily do it himself after retiring while leading the first six laps, one of Carpenter’s biggest fans, 11-year-old Remi Radcliff tugged on the right cuff, helping the 51-year-old driver from Parkersburg, W.Va., wriggled out of the sleeve and eventually the firesuit. 

There was disappointment among Carpenter’s crew for sure, but the pony-tailed Carpenter was able to muster a smile when he was interviewed by Mike Norris to tell the crowd and FloRacing audience that a broken crank trigger had ended his run prematurely.

Why the smile?

Because Carpenter knows the 20-lap event — added to the completion of Eldora’s Dream XXVIII program for drivers who weren’t in the Dream or hadn’t won a feature race at the Tony Stewart-owned oval — proved to him he has a car that could lift him to his first major-race start at Eldora, which hosts Thursday and Friday prelims for Saturday’s $55,000-to-win World 100.

“I feel real good. I mean, I really feel good,” Carpenter said in an interview a few minutes later. “It’s the best piece I’ve had here ever.”

Starting outside the front row, Carpenter didn’t get a good start initially, but he was fortunate that a caution required a complete restart.

“I just didn’t have enough motor on the (first) start,” Carpenter said. “I tried to just go around the top on the initial start and they just motored right by me. On the restart, I went down the middle like they were, and carried a little bit of speed down through there.”

That carried Carpenter from his outside front-row starting spot into the lead. Carpenter was in command the first six laps, and while the eventual winner Marlar — the No. 5-ranked driver in the country in DirtonDirt.com’s Top 25 — was clearly the favorite to win, Carpenter was performing well until he pulled up lame exiting turn four.

“It was flawless. It was perfect,” Carpenter said. “And then when the crank trigger broke, it was like it shut the switch off.”

Carpenter was pushed to the turn-three pit gate and his latest Kryptonite machine — he calls it the Vision car — was then pushed to the outside pits.

“The car was so good. It felt like it couldn’t do no wrong,” Carpenter said. “I made a mistake when the first start, but I learned from that mistake and they give us a restart. And man, it was lights out.

“The cars were always just too tight before. They wouldn’t turn on entry, they wouldn’t turn through the middle or on exit (of the corners), I always had to fight them through the turn. And this car just goes it goes right around the turn. All the changes I made when I built this car were in that direction.”

Carpenter is particularly proud of his Vision car, which he’s equipped with less expensive equipment and components to try and make it about half the cost of the typical Super Late Model.

“I wanted to beat ’em so bad with that car so I could show him what it was, at least tell them what it was. That’s that Vision car I built. … we put the cheapest stuff you can get on this thing. It’s got non-adjustable shocks, $25 ball joints, I mean the cheapest stuff we could get we put on this car,” Carpenter said. “Just trying to make racing affordable, to keep people (competing). Racing’s dying and I’m just trying to keep people in it to show them that you can do it affordably. So that’s why I built this car.”

The cost of the crank trigger that broke?

“It’s about $80 bracket,” Carpenter said. “We’ll replace that we’ll be good to go for tomorrow.”

“If nothing else, it’s a good test session for the rest of the week,” he added. “Man, I don’t think we’ll change anything. I think we’re gonna fix that issue and get right back at it.”

Crew members and others stood by during the interview, including his young fan Remi. Carpenter met the youngster this season.

“We were at West Virginia Motor Speedway earlier in the year and this kid come up and kept teasing us, saying we needed to put WD-40 on our tires to make ’em go,” Carpenter recalled. “I thought he from out of town. Turns out I grew up with his dad (Mike Radcliff) and we went to school together.”

The Lubeck Elementary School student is a “go-getter,” says Carpenter, eager to lend his favorite driver a hand — and some WD-40, like he did recently at Ohio Valley Speedway in Washington, W.Va.

“He brought me two cans, because I started teasing him, calling him WD-40,” Carpenter said. “So he showed up at the race last week and brought me two cans.”