While most dirt late model fans were raving about the success of World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series star Brandon Sheppard this year, Brandon Overton quietly enjoyed the best season of his career.
The 29-year-old native of Evans, Ga., had visited victory lane 26 times through Nov. 22 aboard the No. 76 Longhorn Chassis fielded by Wells & Sons Motorsports.
While Sheppard had won 31 features through Oct. 22, Overton’s victory total was nothing to shake a stick at. In fact, Overton won more races than Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series champion Jimmy Owens (18) and Tim McCreadie (nine), who along with Sheppard were among the best touring dirt late model competitors this year.
“I’ve had a year like this before, so we know, I know, I can do it,” said Overton, who scored a number of marquee victories in 2017 and ’18. “If we have all the people and the right equipment we can do it, but you don’t ever know how stuff’s going to shake out.”
The year started off a bit different for Overton after he parted ways with Joey Coulter’s Rum Runner Racing program following a 12-win season that saw him visit victory lane three times with the World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series and win the Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals Series title.
Overton spent some time thinking about what teams had openings that he could potentially fill. That’s when he thought of Wells & Sons Motorsports, which is owned by David Wells and previously fielded a car for Wells’ son, Eric.
“I was thinking of who had some race cars and who wanted to race,” Overton recalled. “I remembered at about the middle of the year (2019) they hired (Kyle) Strickler to come in and drive. He (Wells) was kind of the first person to pop in my head because I ran up and down the road when I ran with the World of Outlaws.
“Strickler had left to do his deal and I knew they had race cars there and I knew he (Wells) was starting his business up, selling cars,” Overton explained. “So I just shot him a text, he called me right back and we just started talking. Then pretty much everything kind of fell into place.”
The deal was announced in November, which allowed Overton and his new team to run in a few races before the typical winter break in the Southeast. Overton returned to action in February and went right to work, earning a few podium finishes before sweeping the annual Winter Freeze event at Georgia’s Screven Motor Speedway.
That was a harbinger of things to come, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut down racing in March.
Rather than get upset about the racing shutdown, Overton and the Wells & Sons Motorsports team focused on getting their race cars prepared for racing’s return.
“It actually gave us time to sit down and say, ‘OK, we’ve raced eight or nine races and these are some of the problems we’re having. We’re not going to race for another month or two, let’s fix these issues. Let’s go ahead and fix them right now so we don’t spend half the year trying to figure it out,’” Overton said.
“We changed our engine program around and we better suited everything to me, from our shocks to the brakes to the engines. Everything we had run, we looked at every bit of it and sat down and said, ‘OK, we need to change this, this and this.’”
After a fifth-place run in his first race after the COVID-19 shutdown at North Carolina’s Tri-County Racetrack, Overton scored back-to-back victories at South Carolina’s Lancaster and Cherokee Speedways on May 1-2.
By the end of May, Overton had earned seven victories. He added two more in June, six in July, two in August, three in September and four through mid-October. He also clinched his third Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals Series title in the last four seasons.
“We really should have won a lot more races than we did,” Overton said. “We broke two or three times because of stupid stuff, like electrical stuff, in the races we didn’t win. Hell, if we’d capitalized on all of them, we’d have had a really, really good year.”
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