BARTONVILLE — For Mattoon’s Dallas Daniels, victory at the 79th Caterpillar Peoria TT nationals was well worth the wait.
Seven years after winning at the Peoria Motorcycle Race Club as a rookie in an American Flat Track singles event, Daniels stepped up to the main event and finally got the Mission AFT SuperTwins victory he so cherished, defeating three-time champion – and two-time defending champion – Briar Bauman by about one-third of one second Saturday at “Thunder Valley.”
Bauman and Daniels finished 1-2 last year in the SuperTwins main event and for Daniels, victory Saturday in the oldest-running dirt track motorcycle race in the world, may have been the biggest of his still-young career.
“It’s probably the sweetest one of my career,” said Daniels, 23, who rode a Yamaha MT07. “It’s my favorite track on the schedule; I won my first Singles race here. I was like, ‘This is exactly the relationship I want with this place.’ Then, it was a little hectic, back and forth. I had some big crashes, lost some big races, and I had some decent finishes.”
Daniels, who added to his Mission SuperTwins championship lead over Bauman – now 20 points with the two Springfield Mile races set for September as completion to the 16-event 2026 tour – also noted that the biggest win may have been his toughest, understanding the legendary competition he had to defeat.
“I could feel him (Bauman) right there on me, and I could hear him sizing up a move,” Daniels said. “In the last two laps, my tank was on low and I just tried to muster up anything I could. I had a good (Turn) One and Two on the white flag lap and my Three and Four was a bit messy. It was a crazy race.”
Daniels praised the large crowd that came out to “Thunder Valley”, feeling heartened by all the support he had towards his first Peoria SuperTwins TT nationals victory.
“It’s such an amazing day,” Daniels said. “I’m just so happy to do it in front of my friends and family, everybody that’s here. So many people support me, it almost means more than the win to see the support I have.”
Bauman gave his main rival in SuperTwins props on the victory, noting that he just didn’t quite have enough to get it done for a fourth time in Peoria.
“He was flawless,” Bauman said. “The corners, I thought he was better than us and I found a little bit of speed when he came by. You know how it is when you break a little bit later. It was brutal. I wanted to size something up and never had it.”
Daniels and Bauman came in well ahead of third-place finisher Davis Fisher, with Henry Wiles coming in fourth and Kody Kopp, third in the SuperTwins standings, coming in fifth.
Wiles, still racing at age 42, has won the Peoria main event a record 14 times, which earned him the moniker “King Henry” in a Journal Star story after he surpassed the record once held by Chris Carr (the Prince of Peoria).
Drane dominates in Singles to clinch title
Over in the KICKER AFT Singles race, Australian Tom Drane dominated the field, clinching the Singles season championship with two races to spare, getting a nearly two-second victory over his closest competitor, fellow Aussie Max Whale.
Drane now holds a lead of 49 points over Hillsboro’s Chase Saathoff, who finished third in Saturday’s main event. He admitted that all he wanted out of Saturday’s race was to open up a gap early, which he did to aplomb.
“I knew I had to go out there and try to win, so I put my head down for the first half of the race,” Drane said. “I kept looking back and just tried to manage the gap. I didn’t need to do anything silly and brought the championship home.”
Tarren Santero finished fourth, while Bradon Pfanders finished fifth.
Sam Drane won an undercard race, the AFT ProSport 450, earlier Saturday.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: ‘A crazy race’: Rising young rider gets a breakthrough win in 79th Peoria TT
Reporting by Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star | USA TODAY Network
