WHEATLAND, Mo. — Bobby Pierce started from the eighth position to claim his second career Show-Me 100 victory on Saturday night at Lucas Oil Speedway, earning a record $75,000 for the win.
Pierce, who won the race in 2017, led the final 32 laps to secure a lucrative victory, marking his 14th overall win this season.
Jonathan Davenport came home in second, followed by Hudson O’Neal in third, as he fell short of a weekend sweep. Devin Moran finished fourth, and Daulton Wilson rounded out the top five drivers.
O’Neal, who was seeking his fifth straight win at Lucas Oil Speedway, jumped to the lead at the start and would lead the first 19 circuits of the race until Davenport, who started third, moved into the top spot after hounding O’Neal from the drop of the green flag.
Davenport maintained the lead until a restart on lap 44, when O’Neal retook the lead with an outside move on lap 45. O’Neal led for three laps before Davenport reclaimed the lead on lap 48, as an exciting battle for the race lead continued.
Davenport and O’Neal ran first and second until Pierce, who started on the outside of the fourth row, moved into second by lap 66. Three laps later, he made a move for the lead, throwing a slider on Davenport on lap 69 to take over the top position.
Pierce would then battle traffic in the final 30 laps as he and Davenport navigated through it, eventually gaining enough breathing room to win by just over 2 seconds ahead of Davenport at the finish.
“The cushion was tough, you know how this track with the wall is, it doesn’t really build a cushion on the track. It had a little rut there, you kind of set your right side tires in, and sometimes it would grab and go, and sometimes it would toss you, and sometimes it would make you lose, so it was tricky to hit every lap,” Pierce explained. “That’s how this track has been all weekend, it’s a very finesse race track, like you can lose a lot of ground with one mistake like that. It was a really fun race track. I was waiting for that track all weekend. I know with the possibility of rain, they were taking it easy with track prep, and man that was a lot of fun.”
Davenport, the defending race winner, was looking for his third career win in the crown jewel event. He led the most laps (55) during the race and came home in second, earning a $25,000 payday.
“It was really tough to lead tonight, the line moved a lot there until the very end, hats off to the track prep crew,” Davenport said. “Lucas Oil Speedway is awesome whenever it moves around like that. I wish it had made that last change and pushed the cushion over the top, because obviously, I didn’t set up to run around the cushion, you know, I kind of run the middle to the bottom, and we really made big gains today. Then, once we could run around the middle to the bottom, we were really good there. I was kind of messing with the lapped cars there a little bit and not trying to be super aggressive, and I tried to move through as quickly as possible.”
O’Neal was looking to pick up a $5,000 bonus if he won the race to take his winnings to $100,000 for the weekend.
“We just missed it a little bit. We just weren’t prepared for the way the race track was. We thought it was going to slow down way more so we weren’t real concerned about maybe freeing it back up a little bit for the mud we thought it was going to get slow and kind of like it had for the first two nights, just missed it a little bit, all-in-all it was a great race, it turned out to be an awesome race track. We had a great week, we can’t hang our heads over a third-place finish.”
The finish:
Feature: 1. 32-Bobby Pierce[8]; 2. 49-Jonathan Davenport[3]; 3. 71-Hudson O’Neal[1]; 4. 99-Devin Moran[4]; 5. 18D-Daulton Wilson[15]; 6. 93-Carson Ferguson[6]; 7. 20RT-Ricky Thornton Jr[2]; 8. 76-Brandon Overton[10]; 9. 1-Brandon Sheppard[5]; 10. 79-Donald McIntosh[12]; 11. 60-Dan Ebert[19]; 12. 22-Daniel Hilsabeck[13]; 13. 97-Cade Dillard[11]; 14. 58-Garrett Alberson[9]; 15. 11-Gordy Gundaker[17]; 16. 19M-Spencer Hughes[24]; 17. 1XM-Aaron Marrant[25]; 18. 8-Dillon McCowan[18]; 19. 93L-Cory Lawler[22]; 20. 6-Clay Harris[20]; 21. 98-Justin Wells[7]; 22. 2T-Tyler Stevens[14]; 23. 7-Cole Wells[21]; 24. 16-Tyler Bruening[16]; 25. 96-Dalton Imhoff[23]; 26. 15-Clay Stuckey[26]; 27. 8K-Tyler Kuykendall[27]
