Zack Dohm remembers a time when a trip to one of Eldora Speedway’s crown jewel events included surprisingly little on-track action for racers who weren’t quite fast enough to crack the main event lineup.

Back then, when Dohm was a youngster traveling to races with his father Tim, Eldora’s two-day format for it’s Dirt Late Model Dream each June and its World 100 in September provided precious little opportunity for drivers with limited seat time at the famous half-mile track in Rossburg, Ohio, to get comfortable with the high speeds on the track’s high banks.

“Back when my dad used to go, you’d go up there, qualify, run a heat, run a C-Main, then go home,” Dohm of Cross Lanes, W.Va., recalled of his father’s trips to Eldora during the early 2000s when the track still used a two-day format that featured qualifying on Friday followed by Saturday's heat races, consolation races and 100-lap main event. “He never made one of those shows, and I think it was just because he didn’t really get many laps on that place.”

Now 31, and emerging as a standout regional racer in his own right, Dohm doesn’t have to worry about limited track time when he makes trips to Eldora these days. Thanks to the expanded three-night format Eldora began using for the Dream and the World in 2013, regional drivers like Dohm and up-and-comers at all levels get plenty of time to hone their skill at The Big E during two nights of complete preliminary programs that split the field for twin features.

“The way it is now, you’re getting more laps than ever,” said Dohm, who made his Eldora big-event debut at the 2010 World 100 and since beginning to attend the events regularly in 2016 has started two Dreams and three World 100s. “Plus, the way they split the fields for those prelim nights, it gives you a lot better chance to make a feature and get that experience and seat time. You just get to make way more laps nowadays, and that helps a lot of people.”

If Dohm liked Eldora’s three-day format compared to the old two-day program, he’ll likely love what awaits him at Eldora this week. In making up for the event being cancelled in 2020 due to Covid-19, Eldora will host both the 27th and 26th Dirt Late Model Dreams over a four-day stretch Wednesday through Saturday. While each of the events will include just one night of twin feature preliminary action, the opportunity to run essentially four full programs at Eldora, two of them featuring split fields, is more track time at Eldora than Dohm could’ve ever dreamed of a decade ago.

It’s also a chance to earn a lot of money. Held in reverse order, the 27th Dream will pay $127,000-to-win on Thursday and the 26th Dream will pay $126,000-to-win on Saturday. Each event will be preceded by twin $10,000-to-win features on preliminary nights Wednesday and Friday.

A single driver could earn a whopping $273,000 if he were to sweep the weekend. More realistically, with the Dream features both paying a minimum of $2,500 to start and prelim features paying at least $$1,000 to every starter, drivers will earn at least $7,000 if they just make the feature lineup each night.

“I look at that, and I see a good chance to go race for good money,” Dohm said of the double Dreams. “With these deals, if you can just go up there and make all the shows, you end up making out pretty decent. I’ve been there before and made both prelim races and made the feature. I think one year I was fifth in one (prelim feature), ran like 15th in the other and ran 10th in the feature. Hell, we had a $10,000 weekend. That’s pretty solid.”

Like Dohm, Ross Bailes is another upper-tier regional racer who sees the benefit of making the trip to Eldora. The Clover, S.C., driver will be making his third appearance at Eldora during the double Dream week, and he’s going for the first time with car owner Billy Hicks.

“I think for the most part it’s an easy decision to up there with them putting all that money up,” said Bailes, whose only Eldora crown jewel start resulted in a 13th-place finish in the 2019 World 100. “You can go race four nights at the same track for good money. That’s a really good deal for a team like us.”

Even while they eye lucrative paydays, mid-level teams and drivers like Bailes and Dohm have more than just the payout to consider when making the decision to head to Eldora for four straight nights of racing against one of the toughest fields any event will draw all season. The wear and tear on equipment, the extra expense of tires and fuel and convicting crew members to spend nearly a week away from home are just a few of the obstacles they’ll have to overcome even if things go well all week at Eldora.

When it comes to tires, planning ahead for the Eldora trip will be even trickier than usual this year. Along with needing more tires to get through potentially more racing, teams are also dealing with a tire shortage that has reduced the number of tires available to teams in some situations.

“With the tire stuff going on, everybody’s having a hard time getting them and that’s really kind of making things uncertain,” Bailes said. “We don’t have all the tires we need yet, so I don’t know what’s going to happen if they’re going to have more there we can get or what.

“Like I said, it’s really an easy decision to go up there with them putting all that money up, but with the tires, we’ve had to kind of think about it, but it still seems like a smart move to go and just do the best we can to deal with it.”

Of course, the reward for a team that is able to procure all the tires that’ll need for the Eldora trip, is more work during preparations. And it’ll be an especially large amount of work for teams not based in the Midwest. The teams don’t typically run the region’s tire rule of Hoosier LM-20s, -30s and -40s and likely don’t have any of those tires currently mounted up and ready to go.

For Dohm and his team, that extra tire work alone was enough to force him to take the week before the double Dreams off just be sure he got the work done. That meant skipping out on running the $25,000-to-win Historic 100 at West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells, W.Va., just an hour from his shop.

“We don’t ever run those UMP tires so we’ll have some year-old or 2-year-old tires from past years up there,” Dohm said. “We’ve kept them wrapped up and they’re still good and will help so we don’t have to buy so many new ones. Mineral Wells is paying $25,000-to-win right up the road from me, but we’re going to take this weekend off, and the biggest reason is so we can get all the dang tires ready to go. We’ll probably have to unmount 30 or 40 wheels and tires, then get the used UMP tires and the new ones we’re buying mounted up and grooved. That in itself is a full plate.”

Beyond burning up more Hoosiers, competing in the Dream this year will also mean nearly twice the usual wear and tear on cars, engines and equipment than comes during usual trips. That’s something Chad Simpson of Mount Vernon, Iowa, was quick to realize when the doubleheader was announced earlier this season.

“The biggest difference is going to be the wear and tear,” said Simpson, who has two Dream main event starts, two World 100 starts and made the show for the Intercontinental Classic that was ran in place of last year’s World 100 amid tight coronavirus restrictions . “We can normally go on the road three or four nights and put a couple 100 laps on a motor and it’s not a big deal. This deal here, you’re going to be putting 250 laps just in features. That’s something we don’t normally do, but everything else, I think we’re used to. You just have to have your ducks in a row and be ready to go.”

Luckily for Simpson, who fields his own team on the Lucas Oil Midwest LateModel Racing Association and in other major events around Missouri and Iowa, he has a second ride for Eldora with Morning Motorsports and car owner Larry Moring.

“This year with the back-to-back Dreams and Worlds, I’d say we would definitely do whatever we could to go run those, but it would be a lot tougher decision and just a lot harder on us overall to do that,” Simpson said when asked if he would still run the Dream and World if not for the ride in Moring’s Black Diamond Race Car. “It helps out a lot. It’s a lot less wear and tear on my equipment and stuff like that. Larry’s always got top-notch equipment for me to run that’s prepared the best it can be. That always makes it nice for those bigger shows to be able to run with Larry and kind of save my stuff for the races closer to home.”

Dohm will head to Eldora in the opposite situation as Simpson. His family-owned team will attend the event with one car, one engine and a limited number of spare parts.

“We’ve got spare front suspension stuff, but like I don’t have a way to carry a spare rear end or anything like that with me,” said Dohm, who hauls his Longhorn car to the track in a single-car enclosed trailer. “If we have any issues with anything like that, we’ll have to figure something out while we’re there or maybe that’s the end of it.

“The good thing about Eldora is it’s normally not rough. It’s always pretty smooth and wide and racy. There’s usually plenty of room to race. There’s always a chance somebody could wreck and somehow you end up in it, but you cross your fingers on that part and hope that doesn’t end up happening. If we do mess anything up, hopefully it’s something we have a spare of in the trailer or a buddy we can buy one off of.”

The lack of a spare engine is what concerns Dohm most about making the trip. He knows all too well the potential of breaking an engine at Eldora after his most recent visit to the track for last year’s Intercontinental Classic saw him blow a motor while leading his heat race on a preliminary night.

Similar to the tire shortage, engine builders are also facing difficulties keeping up with engine builds and rebuilds as demand has gone up and supplies have gotten harder to get. A combination of that and Dohm’s own procrastination have left him in a tough spot heading back to Eldora.

“We’ve got four engines, but only one of them is runnable right now,” said Dohm, who along with his family owns and operates Dohm Cycles in Charleston, W.Va., as he primary occupation. “We don’t have a spare so we’re just going up there and hoping and praying we don’t have an issue.

“It’s tough to be in a situation like this, but it’s kind of self-inflicted. We had two motors in the floor of the shop that were lapped out (at the end of the 2020 season). We just didn’t get them down there (to engine builder Vic Hill) like we needed to. We’d be in a lot better position if we had got them down there to him in December, but we didn’t do nothing with them until we got home from Florida (Speedweeks in February). Then we had one go down to a parts failure so now we’re in a pickle with just one engine.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think (shortages) would affect the racing world because it’s affected our business for going on a year now. We’ve got five motorcycles in here for sale and that’s it. No four-wheels, no side-by-sides, no jet-skies, no generators. It’s pretty crazy, but that’s the world we’re living in these days. We just make the best of it.”

Another important piece to the puzzle for any race team is reliable crew help. For regional teams, that can be difficult to come by for trips like Eldora that will take crew members away from work and family for an extended time.

For Simpson, another benefit to his ride with Moring Motorsports is a combined crew effort between Moring and his own team. Even so, making the logistics work for every involved isn’t easy even for Simpson himself.

“It’s tough, especially on us on a regional deal,” Simpson said. “It makes it real tough just because everybody has full time jobs. You’re trying to get your stuff done so you can go and making sure you have enough help coming along. My guys have already killed a lot of vacation and myself I’ve got my own sign business that I run. I’ve been thrashing hard for three days trying to get everything ready to go and make sure everything’s taken care of.”

Bailes likewise had to begin planning for crew help during his Eldora trip well in advance. He has enough crew help lined up to get him through the trip so long as no major setbacks send the team into scramble mode.

“You’re going to have to have two or three guys to keep up with everything, but we’ve been planning on this trip for a while, so a couple of my guys already took off work,” Bailes said. “Even with that, you still kind of got to hope you don’t tear anything up while you’re up there or it could really set you behind.”

Despite all the tricky logistics, extra work and additional expenses, a chance to compete four straight nights at Eldora in what is likely one of the biggest weeks of racing ever in Dirt Late Model racing, remains appealing for drivers. For Dohm, missing it would be unthinkable.

“The big thing is I just don’t want to miss Eldora,” Dohm said. “It’s the best racetrack in the country and has the biggest event in our sport. The atmosphere’s the best. It’s big and fast, but it’s not usually hard on equipment. If we make every race and make every lap, yeah we’ll have a lot of laps, but those feature laps when the track usually slicks off aren’t really that hard on your stuff. We’ll have some regrouping to do when we get back home, but I guess we’ll just worry about that when we get to it.”