Jonathan Davenport's preliminary nights at Eldora Speedway's Stream Invitational couldn't have gone much worse with a laundry list of troubling issues and finishes of 18th and 24th.

But anyone who counted out the 36-year-old Blairsville, Ga., driver was regretting it Saturday when Davenport recovered for a second-place finish in his heat race, earning a fifth-row starting spot for the 67-lap main event.

He quickly went to work in the $50,000-to-win, spectator-free feature, grabbing second from the outset and then slipping under leader Brandon Sheppard on the 18th lap to take command after an early restart. Alas, Davenport's bid for a remarkable turnaround slipped away as Sheppard regained the lead on the 36th lap, then Davenport got the short end of the wild scramble on the final restart and was shuffled back from fourth to ninth.

That wasn't quite enough to salvage the weekend for the driver with four crown jewel triumphs at Eldora since 2015.

"If we hadn't been leading at one point we'd probably been happy with it, but no," Davenport told DirtonDirt.com's Dustin Jarrett. "We just, hell, we didn't get to work on our race car all weekend. We was two days behind. So we finally had a little bit of luck go our way. And we got in through the heat, was fortunate to get track position there.

"And we finally took a breather and was able to work on the race car a little bit. And we made it all a whole lot better, as you can see, but we just didn't go far enough with the changes and were just way too free. And I was really surprised. I (overtook) Sheppard there for a while and I found me a pretty good groove and I was trying not to kill my right rear tire and knock a deck out of it."

With high-flying Illinois drivers Sheppard and Bobby Pierce out front along with eventual winner Tim McCreadie in the race's late stages, Davenport was further back in fourth over the final 20 or so laps. Then the bottom dropped out on the green-white-checkered restart that extended the race to 68 laps.

"I thought the bottom would be the place to be at the end of the race, but you never know," Davenport said. "I mean, it's a little bit shorter race (than Eldora's traditional 100-lappers), so it's different. But, like I said, we would've been happy with a ninth if we hadn't been leading, but then that last caution come out and I knew I was going to get stuck on the outside and I didn't need to be there.

"So I was trying to get to the bottom. I almost got too good a run on Sheppard and Bobby and I thought Bobby would blow it off in there a little harder than he did. So I had to check up behind him and I bottomed out and I tried not to put Sheppard in the wall, and then I just got tagged from behind and just got freight-trained after that."

Another top-five for Fergy

Chris Ferguson of Mount Holly, N.C., coming off his steadiest career performances at Eldora last season, was able to nab another top-five finish at the legendary track despite a weekend that he labeled as "very inconsistent."

The weekend's overall fast qualifier from Thursday night, in the opening 30-lap prelim he started a promising sixth but slipped back to a lackluster 10th after early-race contact hampered his car's handling. In Friday's prelim he was an early retiree. And it didn't get much better for Ferguson in Saturday's prelims when he said he "just dug the hole there in the heat race and totally forgot how to drive for about 15 laps."

Indeed, Ferguson's eighth-place finish forced him into a provisional starting spot in the ninth row of the main event, where he slowly but steadily advanced, breaking into the top 10 near halfway and jumping from eighth to fifth in the two-lap dash to the checkers after the final restart.

"We're happy with the top-five again here," he said. "We got one last year in the Dream and just inched forward, but man, we need to stop digging a hole and stop having to start 18th and 17th and all that.

"We just had a really good car. Even if I went on the bottom, I was stuck in the middle, and I didn't have to rely on that cushion," Ferguson added. "I actually raced through there, at the beginning of the race, with (runner-up) Bobby (Pierce), we kind of were splitting cars, but man, that top was just way faster, and he drove away from me and he got to the front a lot faster than we did, but I didn't have to rely on it.

"So there at the end, in the last restart, some guys would slip up and miss, and I could either go right through the middle or the bottom and had just a good car all around, just barely missed it. But any time you have a good car, you can drive by people."

The fifth-place finish overshadowed the rest of his struggles.

"It's kind of like playing golf: you can have a bad round or a bad heat race like I did and be ready to quit. Then you hit that one good shot or have that one good run, and we're ready to go back again," he said. "Yeah, that top-five definitely is a big booster, and now we're ready to go to the next one. I guess we're running (the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C.) next Friday, but just like that we're pumped up and we feel like we're a million bucks and can go win a race."

Solid run for Babb

Shannon Babb had to flip a lot of calendar pages to find his previous top-10 finish in a major Eldora race. So while his starting spot came via a provisional, and he finished a modest seventh, the 46-year-old Moweaqua, Ill., driver was pleased with the Bloomquist Race Car he's only recently started driving.

"Starting in the back, I told myself, ‘We're just going to cruise around here, around the bottom.’ And they watered that bottom and it was really good," said Babb, who was granted the 25th starting spot by Eldora general manager Roger Slack after he was disqualified from a heat race transfer spot for failing to make legal weight. "I had a lot of traction down there, but it equalized about, I'm going to say, three-quarters of the way through, the top slowed down. And I don't think I abused my car very much, so I was able to creep up through there on the restarts and take advantage of it."

Bloomquist's Team Zero Race Cars have a reputation for strong performances in long-distance events, and he finished just behind a trio of Bloomquist drivers in Dale McDowell (third), Chris Ferguson (fifth) and Ricky Weiss (sixth).

"These cars always seem to (in) 100-lappers, they seem to creep forward or the other cars seem to slide back, one of the two," Babb said. "But I just, as I was driving, I was just really impressed. Scott, he has really, really done a lot to be able to make these cars fast.

"Ricky and everybody in these cars ran really good around here. Over the years, he's put a lot into this place, and he's got a great race car here. So yeah, it meant a lot to me to be able to cruise around there. And he had us right on the money."

Babb's seventh-place finish was his best big-race performance at Eldora since a 10th-place run in the 2014 Dream, and just his third top-10 run at Eldora over the last 12 seasons.

Prelim winners non-factors

Winning one of the 30-lap preliminary features at the Stream Invitational was no guarantee of Saturday night success. In fact, neither Kyle Strickler of Mooresville, N.C., nor Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., made it to the halfway point of the 67-lapper.

Overton simply had no drive in the race car that carried him to a $10,000 Friday victory, and one of the nation's hottest drivers immediately faded from his eighth starting spot. Overton was running 18th when he pitted during a lap-17 caution (more later on that yellow flag that involved Strickler) to try and diagnose his issues.

Overton returned the race, but ended up retiring after 27 laps. He surmised that his rough ride in turn one during heat action — his car briefly appeared like it might roll over — must've bent something on the car.

Strickler's demise had a few more fireworks.

Starting seventh, Strickler held the 10th spot on lap 17 when eventual runner-up Bobby Pierce tried to dive under Strickler in turn three. Impeded by a low-running Devin Moran, Pierce's slider knocked Strickler into the outside wall and out of the race.

"I guess we got Bobby Pierced right there. I don't know. I'm new at this and I know I'm not the first person he's done that to. I don't know," Strickler told the FloRacing audience shortly after gesturing to Pierce on the track. "Why the hell would you do that on lap (17)? Maybe he's going to put a show on for all the fans here I guess. It's just completely stupid and just wrecked our race car for no reason, so I hope somebody gives it right back to him. I'm sure he'll get what's coming to him."

Pierce took the blame.

"I got to say (I) apologize to Kyle Strickler," he said after his $10,000 second-place finish. "I know I would have been mad, too, because I wasn't necessarily clear, but it's one of those deals where the air is so crazy here.

"I was going in for a slider and the last second Devin went to the middle, instead of the bottom, and to keep from hitting him, and I got his dirty air. I just slid right up the track, right away. Didn't give me a chance to actually complete the slider, and got into Kyle, put him in the wall."

When Strickler visited winner Tim McCreadie's trailer to talk to McCreadie's engineer Kevin Rumley after the race, Pierce was also there and the combatants spoke cordially about the incident.