Darrell Wallace Jr. wins at Eldora Speedway; Kyle Larson steals the show

Last year’s inaugural Mudsummer Classic was an overriding success. So much so, Tony Stewart immediately became concerned how Eldora Speedway was going to match the excitement when the Camping World Truck Series returned for a second visit.

Eldora’s owner shouldn’t have distressed himself. Because not only was the second Mudsummer Classic as compelling as the original Wednesday, it might have exceeded its predecessor.

Disregard Darrell Wallace Jr. leading 97 of 150 laps en route to an emotional victory. Instead, be mindful of what happened between the green flag dropping and the checkered flag wavering. That was when an abundance of side-by-side racing featuring drivers bouncing off one another and the walls was common place throughout the night.

No one in the 30-truck field escaped without some sort of damage, including Wallace. The 20-year-old driving for Kyle Busch Motorsports scraped the wall on more than one occasion even as he continued to hold the point. Fox Sports calculated Eldora’s walls were contacted 317 times, a staggering figure considering the race was not quite 90 minutes.

“I’m going to sum this up really short and really easy,” Stewart said. “If you didn’t like that race, you don’t know what racing is all about.

“Because when you have a half-mile dirt track and you have trucks four-wide, legitimately four- and three-wide for a bunch of the race, we don’t even have that at any of our big races. As good as it was last year, this definitely topped it.”

While Wallace left with the golden shovel awarded to the victor, it was Larson who made the biggest impression. The heralded Sprint Cup rookie with a background in dirt sprint cars offered a clinic on how to best navigate the half-mile oval, adroitly completing passes high, low and wherever.

It wasn’t Larson’s precision, however, that stood out. No, it was how he manhandled his truck often beyond the edge of control only to carry on without slowing down. In a desperate attempt to catch Wallace in the final stages, Larson, running second, pounded the wall nearly every lap.

Even with a crunched hood, a front bumper barely hanging on and the right side flattened like a steamrolled pancake, Larson still gained ground on Wallace.

Then it was over after one hit too many caused Larson to slow with two laps to go. His truck was battered, beaten and finally, broken. Larson dropped to 26th overall. Few, though, would remember where he finished.

“Kyle had one of those gladiator runs,” Stewart said. “He did not leave anything on the table. If he wasn’t going to win it, he was going to wear it. That’s moments that happen at places like this that make for great racing.”

For Wallace the win was a shock. Eldora was only his second start on dirt, and he never expected to be a challenger Wednesday. Yet there he was up front and dominating. Even when Larson charged, Wallace never wavered.

“Holy cow,” Wallace said in Victory Lane. “Eldora? No Way! Are you kidding me?”

No one was joking, and that includes Stewart. Having stated his case earlier in the day that Eldora deserved a Sprint Cup date, Stewart disclosed a grandiose idea post-race.

“If we can raise $25 million, we will put a dome over Eldora Speedway,” Stewart said. “This is not a joke.”

However outlandish it may sound, is there any reason to doubt that Stewart, who says he had an engineering firm study the feasibility, could pull off such a feat? In consecutive years, he has done the once unthinkable having staged a pair of highly successful races on a type of track that, until last year, was alien to NASCAR for 40-plus years.

It’s an idea that, if it ever does come to fruition, would really give Stewart a reason to be stressed. Then he’d find a way to make it go off without a hitch; just as he did Wednesday.