In his third season of racing, Dusty Quillen finally earned his first feature win. It took him that long to put together the winning pieces of the puzzle that enabled Quillen to travel to victory lane.
As a teenager, Dusty Quillen worked alongside his father, Dwight Quillen, on a mini stock driven by a family friend. One night, at North Alabama Speedway in Tuscumbia, Quillen turned some laps in the car after the show ended.
“[My father] made me get into a car — I didn’t want to [drive it],” said Quillen, 20, of Florence, Alabama. “Once I got behind the wheel, I fell in love with it.”
Smitten with racing, his father bought Quillen a mini stock the next week and he went racing. Quillen’s first couple of races didn’t go smoothly.
“The first week, [the car] overheated,” Quillen said. “The next week, I got put into the wall and totaled it.”
Later that season, Quillen bought another mini stock and then later a late model sportsman. The late model had a Chevrolet Performance 602 engine under the hood and a 2014 Rocket Chassis Blue-Gray frame. Unfortunately, Quillen started the 2021 season with a bang.
“I got spun out, and was sitting in the middle of turn, and the last-place car T-boned me,” said Quillen of the wreck he endured at Camden Speedway in Tennessee.
Quillen, who had just sold his mini stock, hoped to use that money to buy a Chevrolet Performance 604 engine and move up a class. Instead, he put it toward a 2020 Rocket Chassis Blue-Gray bare chassis from Brucebilt Performance.
“We learned a lot by putting [the new car] together,” Quillen said. “Earlier in the year, I’d be running fifth every week. I knew I was missing something. From putting the new car together, I figured out my axle tube was too short on both sides of the car. That’s why I’d be so good in qualifying and then I’d lose spots in the feature.”
Quillen worked not only on his car, but his father returned to racing too, steering a modified. It was a lot of work for Quillen. Luckily, a friend rose to the occasion.
“It was getting hard on me to work on both of [the cars] and working [a day job],” said Quillen, who earns a living mowing lawns. “So, I asked one of my buddies from high school, Colby Beck, to come [to the races]. He had never been around racing. [Colby] fell in love with [the sport] like me. He always wants to work on the car and go off to races.
“That extra person helps so much at the races. While I’m making adjustments, he’s getting tires ready and making sure everything’s ready to go.”
In July, at Moulton Speedway in Danville, Alabama, Haden Duncan, a former racer who was a friend of a friend, approached Quillen.
“[Duncan] started talking with me [and] said, ‘Do you want to win or not? ’” Quillen said. “I said, ‘Heck, yeah!’ We walked to the track. He told me, ‘If you let off the gas right here and then turn and fuel back up, you’ll be three tenths faster than anybody.’ I thought about that the whole time before qualifying. We were actually four tenths faster than the whole field and then I led every single lap of that race.”
Since then, Dusty Quillen has become no stranger to winning. He won again at Moulton Speedway and earned his third career victory at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Summertown, Tennessee. Quillen sits fifth in points nationally for the Crate Racin’ USA late model sportsman division.
“I was getting frustrated [before my first win] — I’m real competitive and I hate losing,” said Quillen. “[The hard times] made that [first] win even better.”
The Outside Groove Executive Editor has covered motorsports since 2000. His many awards include the 2019 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Jim Hunter Writer of the Year and the 2013 Russ Catlin Award for Excellence in Motorsports Journalism.
