Lavender Back in a Late Model

By Jim Carson • Late Model Digest Editor • www.latemodeldigest.net

Mooresville, NC (04/29/10) - In the last two seasons Jody Lavender has toured with what is now the NASCAR K&N Pro East Series. Before that he spent four years with USAR Pro Cup and the old NASCAR All Pro/ Southeast circuit, and even made 21 attempts in the then-NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

This year he wants to stay closer to home more. A primary reason is right there on the side of his new Super Late Model, which he unloaded for the first time at the Orange Blossom Special at Orange County Speedway. “The number’s 115 because that’s my daughter’s birthday, 11/5,” Lavender said.

More weekends at home doesn’t mean there isn’t as much on his plate. Around the time of Taylor’s birth in 2008, he started his own race shop, called Custom Race Chassis. A lot of his work has been fabrication for Truck, Nationwide and ARCA teams; he had a hand in building trucks for Billy Ballew Motorsports, which was among the top winning teams in 2009. Lavender also is a consultant for Pro Cup driver John Gibson, who had his best career result in the series April 17 at New Smyrna, Fla.

Now Late Models are back on Lavender’s agenda. He had his own for the first time at OCS, and the Shark Race Development cars of team owner Jay Fogleman and second-year Pro All Stars Series driver Steven Legendre were also Custom cars.

“I used to build chassis and suspensions when I lived in Hartsville, S.C.,” Lavender said. “I hadn’t really done anything in a while. About a year ago I got back into it, but I haven’t really pushed it too hard trying to get a lot out there until we knew we had a proven piece. I wanted to get something to talk about.”

There was plenty of good talk after the first two 2010 PASS South events. Legendre debuted in a Custom car in the season opener at Dillon Motor Speedway and finished a career-best third. Three weeks later Fogleman drove one of Lavender’s creations for the first time at Hickory Motor Speedway and he came home second, after being in the mix for the lead until a bleeder problem kept him from holding off eventual winner Preston Peltier. The connection between Lavender and Fogleman was a natural one. In 2007, Lavender’s last of four in Pro Cup, he drove for the “Short Track Shark,” back when the team was called JFco Motorsports.

“We’d always been friends,” Lavender said. “When I got this thing going, we talked about doing one for him, but he couldn’t at the time. At the end of last year he got with me to build him a car … and they got it done in time to go to Hickory with it. I don’t build a run-of-the-mill race car; it’s not assembly-line produced. I’m able to start with a clean sheet of paper and add a lot of design elements to it that some other guys don’t have. I felt I’ve built a real safe race car; for example, the door bar heights are a lot higher than anybody else’s and that adds strength to the cage. Going through NASCAR’s safety practices and having to add some things to the Trucks and Nationwide cars I’ve worked on have helped. We’re also one of the lightest. I weigh 230, and my car still held 260 pounds of lead.”

Safety wasn’t the issue that disappointed Lavender at Orange County. Fogleman and Legendre had their difficulties and finished in the mid-teens, and Lavender was caught up in a wreck. All three were among a group docked one of two laps in qualifying as they were late to afternoon tech. “Everybody whose haulers were on the back straightaway never got the word in time to line up for qualifying,” he said. “I was trying to finish getting a piece of lead bolted in the car. We started further back than we should have. After the wreck I was able to keep it going, but the car wasn’t really that good any more. We came in to make an adjustment and the thing cut off; it wound up melting the distributor leads on it. My car had never been tested. Some of the stuff you just don’t know and can’t simulate until you go racing.

“It’s funny. Out of seven races I’ve been involved in this season, we had five top-threes (counting Lavender’s second in the NASCAR East opener at Greenville-Pickens and Gibson’s two Pro Cup races). At Orange County we couldn’t even get a top-10.”

The pursuit will continue for Lavender’s first win of any kind since a Pro Cup show at Ace Speedway in 2005. He has three more East starts scheduled, including two at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the home track for his Maine-based car owner Jim Burgess. He wants to drive in a few more PASS South shows and go to some of the remaining Pro Cup events and a couple of test sessions with Gibson.
 

[Top]