Oregon’s Taylor Dippman wins at Oakshade Raceway

Oregon late model race car driver Taylor Dippman was in good company at Oakshade Raceway in Fulton County.

Former NASCAR Truck Series driver Chad Finley scored his first dirt late model feature win of the year last Saturday night at Oakshade. 

But Dippman did her part, too, winning the Bomber B Main feature, but it was not easy.

A spectacular crash brought the Bomber B Main to an immediate halt on the very first lap. Dylan Wittes got in front of the field and got turned sideways entering turn three and barrel rolled several times. Wittes was uninjured but was done for the night. 

Once racing resumed, Burt Sharp paced the field with Dippman following in second. A car length or two separated Sharp and Dippman for most of the race. On the final lap, Dippman drove hard under Sharp going into the final set of turns. 

Somehow Dippman’s car stuck and the Oregon driver came off the final corner with the lead and was first to cross the finish line. Sharp came across second with Alex Stoudinger recovering after an earlier caution to finish third. John Lonabarger and Scott Forrest finished fourth and fifth, respectively. 

Dippman was not even old enough to have a driver’s license when she first started racing, yet at age 14 she got to go 60 miles an hour around corners nearly every weekend. Legally. Dippman, who was entering her freshman year at Northwood High School in 2012 and racing at Oakshade, had been driving race cars for three years — since she was 11. She followed in the footsteps of her father, Craig, who has been tearing around race tracks throughout the Midwest since 2001.

“I always went to races when he went,” Taylor told The Press. “At 10 or 11 I started getting into it and watching every single race instead of hanging out with my friends. My dad said, ‘We’ll have to get you a car’ and my grandpa (Terry Carroll) got me a car. He owns a junkyard and we built a Dodge Neon into a ‘Hornet.’ That was my first car. I was really excited about it and I was anxious to race.”

The young Dippman competed in the Hornet Division, for ages 12-18, when she started at Oakshade. The Hornets are pure stock four-cylinder front-wheel drive cars that typically have 125-140 horsepower.

“They go about 60-65 miles an hour going into the corner,” Craig Dippman said.

Now, she is hitting speeds over 100 miles per hour on Oakshade’s dirt track, and her youth experience is paying off.

(— from Scott Hammer/Oakshade media relations and a file story by Press contributing writer Mark Griffin)