BEDFORD, Pa. — Standing amid of circle of family and friends in Bedford Speedway’s upper pit area after watching Jeff Rine drive their car to a dominating victory in Saturday’s fifth annual Keystone Cup, brothers Bob Elbin Jr. and Tim Elbin flashed smiles that revealed deep satisfaction. Words were barely needed to highlight the significance of the $22,000 first-place check they had just claimed. | RaceWire

“This is just great,” said Bob Jr., 69, still flying high shortly after dishing out excited high-fives to anyone in his path as he made his way to the infield stage for the postrace ceremonies.

“We’ll have to go in another tax bracket now. She’s really worried about that,” Tim, 57, quipped while motioning toward his wife Suzanne, who handles the financial books for Elbin Racing.

Tim did allow one thought, though, about what he and his brother will do with their portion of the substantial windfall.

“We’re gonna call Longhorn (Chassis) here in a couple days,” he said, already looking toward possible improvements for the 2023 season.

The triumph certainly provided a lucrative sendoff to the winter for the Elbins, whose operation of a modest, one-night-a-week Super Late Model effort continues a family tradition dating back to 1956 when their late father, Bob Sr., began racing in sprint cars and other divisions. The family has fielded a Super Late Model out of their shop in Woodbury, Pa., about a half-hour’s drive from Bedford, for just more than two decades with Danville, Pa.’s Rine behind the wheel since 2005.

In an era when weekly Super Late Model competition has dwindled across the country because of the extensive cost/reward ratio, the Elbins keep rolling along even in the wake of their father’s passing, at the age of 88, on Sept. 28, 2021. They still have their race-loving, 87-year-old mother Leona — Bob Sr.’s wife for 69 years — cheerleading them on, so there’s no way they can stop.

“She’s the one, right here,” Bob Jr. said, pointing at his mother standing to his left in the pit area following her joyful participation in the victory lane picture-taking. “She keeps us going.”

The money Rine, 45, collected for the team helps as well. A $22,000 payday — plus the $2,200 Rine earned for capturing one Friday’s twin 20-lap semifeatures — is one heck of a shot in the arm for a local team that hasn’t raced anywhere but Bedford in years, owns just one other five-figure checkered flag (Rine’s $15,000 victory in 2018’s inaugural Keystone Cup) and likely didn’t accumulate that sum in its other 13 starts at Bedford this season (including three wins and five runner-up finishes en route to a third straight track title).

Just like when Rine won the first Keystone Cup five years ago, his triumph Saturday represented one of the feel-good stories of the Dirt Late Model campaign. Rine is an accomplished veteran with a sparkling resume — including 14 championships at Selinsgrove (Pa.) Speedway and eight at Bedford as well as a 2017 World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series victory at Selinsgrove — but he’s a weekend warrior driving for a team that races only in its backyard, and that’s a combination rarely seen winning the division’s highest-paying events.

“It’s a cool win, especially being the biggest race at your home track,” Rine said. “It’s a small team, but we get help from Nick Stine at Penske (Shocks), Matt Langston at Longhorn, the guys at Hoosier. We got a lot of really good guys behind us.”

They were ready for Bedford’s big weekend, too. The Elbins had their Clements motor freshened for the final three races of the season and Rine won Oct. 15’s $3,000 Keystone Cup Tuneup feature with the powerplant bolted inside the team’s 2017 Longhorn, the ’18 Keystone Cup-winning machine that the team decided to return to service after Rine’s 21st-place run — an outing plagued early by brake trouble that resulted in his only finish worse than sixth all season at Bedford — in Sept. 2’s Labor Day 55.

For the Elbins and Rine, the previous week’s show at Bedford truly lived up to its “tuneup” moniker.

“Oh yeah, that’s for sure,” Rine said when asked if his Oct. 15 win provided any critical intelligence for the Keystone Cup. “We definitely tried some stuff last week and it worked really good, so we kept fine-tuning it.”

While many of Rine’s rivals on Saturday were flummoxed by track conditions that were decidedly less abrasive than normal — leading to incorrect tire and setup choices — he had his machine adjusted perfectly and bolted on the right compound and style tires.

“I think we had a different set of right-rear/left-front than everyone else, and we learned that last week,” Tim Elbin said. “(The feature) was 30 laps last week and this was 60, and from what we saw last week we figured we could make 60 laps" without wearing out the tire they chose.

Rine showed plenty of speed in Friday’s preliminary program, setting fast time and turning back a challenge from Garrett Smith of Eatonton, Ga., the 19-year-old who one week earlier won the $100,000 Dirt Track World Championship at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park, to claim the first semifeature. Rine's showing attracted attention from the biggest names in the pits.

“Scott Bloomquist come down last night wanting to know what we were running,” Tim Elbin said of the Hall of Famer from Mooresburg, Tenn., who wasn’t in competition but made the trip to Bedford with Smith’s team. “He walked down and asked. That’s pretty cool.”

Ultimately no one could match what Rine had in his No. 92. He started outside the front row in the headliner and surged ahead of Ridgeley, W.Va.’s Matt Cosner for the lead at the initial green flag and never looked back.

“I sailed it in about as hard as I thought I could,” Rine said of his first-lap charge.

Aside from a fleeting threat from Cosner and Gregg Satterlee of Indiana, Pa. — the race’s second- and third-place finishers — when he reached lapped traffic after a dozen laps, Rine firmly controlled the action, lapping all but eight competitors en route to winning the caution-free race by a commanding margin of 4.618 seconds.

There was even some extra importance to the victory for Rine, who tied Scotty Haus of Hamburg, Pa., as Bedford’s all-time winningest Super Late Model driver with his 37th career triumph.

“Scotty Haus and I go way back,” Rine said, proud to share the milestone with Haus. “When I first started racing he was racing and he was the man to beat. There’s a couple nights at Port Royal it was him and I down to the checkered. He kept you on your toes because he wasn’t afraid to rub you.”

Rine is well aware that he’s risen to the top of the Bedford feature win chart thanks to his association with the Elbins, who for the past 18 years have given him the opportunity to add Friday action at Bedford to his Saturday diet of Selinsgrove or Port Royal competition driving for the late Jeff Kurtz and his wife Kathy.

“It’s definitely a big family and they treat me like one of theirs,” Rine said of the Elbins. “We get along really good. Bobby and Tim, they’re brothers, and sometimes we fight like brothers, but it just works out good for all of us.

“We lost ‘ol Bob (Sr.) in September (last year) and lost Jeff (Kurtz) in February,” he continued. “It’s just awesome that the Kurtz family is keeping my (No.) 2J going (on Saturdays) and these guys are keeping this car going. It just shows how much they all love racing.”