From Struggle to Strength: The Night Tommy Gorman’s Season Finally Came Alive

There's wins that happen because everything goes right... then there's the wins that happen because a driver and his team spend half a season fighting through the little things, keep digging, keep making changes, keep showing up, and eventually everything finally clicks.

For Tommy Gorman, Saturday night at 35 Raceway Park felt a whole lot more like the second one. Tommy didn't just win his first feature of the 2026 season, he won it the way every driver hopes to win one: from the pole, Tommy went into Turn 1 and came out of Turn 2 with the lead. He led every lap of his heat race. He led every lap of the feature. And when rain interrupted the feature with roughly three laps remaining, Tommy had already put himself in position to finish the job...

Then the track changed.

The rain went away. The track was reworked. The surface went from slick to tacky, and the field lined back up single-file for the final restart.

Tommy took the green flag and never looked back. The checkered flag waves, Tommy scores his first feature win of the year... and perhaps more importantly, the feeling that the car underneath him is finally where he wants it to be.

"The car handled great," Tommy said. "Track was kind of slick at the beginning, then when the rain came the track went tacky."

He had been catching lapped traffic before the rain arrived, but the weather gave him a completely different challenge for those final laps. When the race resumed, he didn't give anybody a chance.

And now, just a few days removed from that first win of the season, Tommy's getting a little bit of a spotlight of his own. This Thursday, Tommy will be featured on the Performance Racing Network's At The Track. That's pretty damn cool for a guy who's spent the last few years building his racing career from the ground up, and even cooler when you consider what this season has looked like for him.

Because this win didn't come out of nowhere, either. Two weeks earlier, Tommy made a small change to the car. The first night out on that change, he finished second, and he wasn't just riding around. He spent 15 laps door-to-door with leader Brandon Dunaway, showing that whatever had been changed had given the car a little something extra.

"Now this week I've finally picked up a win," Tommy said.

That progression matters because the 2026 season hasn't exactly been a smooth one for Tommy. The car has been competitive. The results, for the most part, prove that... but there's been enough little problems along the way to keep him from feeling like he had everything completely sorted out.

An overheating issue early in the season was robbing the car of power. A change in oil brought on lifter chatter. A brake caliper was hanging up. At one point, Tommy finished third in a race with the car reaching roughly 230 degrees... at those temperatures, there isn't much a driver can do.

"When they get that hot, they just don't have no power," Tommy explained. "They want to start giving up."

So the team went back to the thicker oil he'd always run. They added two fans to get more air through the radiator. They fixed the brake issue, and somewhere along the way, the little bugs that have seemingly followed Tommy into the early portion of every racing season started disappearing.

"I mean, it's been phenomenal all year," Tommy said. "It's just, you know, them little things."

That's something Tommy's learned to expect.

"I always struggle at the beginning of every season. I don't know why, but it seems like every beginning of the season I struggle. But then about midway through is whenever I start to come on strong."

That sounds about right when you look at the road he's traveled since making the jump from demolition derbies to dirt racing in 2022. Tommy estimates Saturday's win was his sixth feature victory since making that transition. The first few seasons were more about learning and surviving than stacking up checkered flags. Motor problems cost him races, even when the car was competitive.

His first feature win didn't come until 2024... then came three wins that season. Two more followed in 2025, and now, in 2026, the sixth has arrived.

A huge part of that progression goes back to Charles Dozer, who helped Tommy get into the car he's raced his way to so much success with. Tommy had always raced Escort GTs. Dozer wanted a ZX2. The two worked out a deal, and the rest has become a pretty damn good little chapter in Tommy's racing career.

"Ever since then, you know, I've been pretty competitive at week in, week out."

Now the timing of this latest win couldn't be much better. Tommy's sitting at the top of the 35 Raceway Park points battle, with James Deal and Nate Dunaway right there in the mix. The official points hadn't yet been updated following Saturday's race when Tommy and I talked, but he expected to have gained significant ground on Deal after Deal finished behind him in both the heat and feature. While the points battle is still very much alive, Tommy knows better than most that a points lead at this stage of the season means absolutely nothing if you stop bringing your A-game.

"With James, it don't matter if you got a 30-point lead," he said. "If you're not on your A-game every week, he'll definitely take it. He's not no slouch in that class."

Dunaway isn't exactly backing down either... He finished second to Tommy Saturday night, and Tommy was quick to point out just how much progress he's seen from the driver.

"Nate's come a long way," Tommy said. "He's getting some help, you know, setup advice from Charles Dozer, and that dude just helps anybody that'll listen."

Tommy knows exactly what that kind of help can do. He's been on the receiving end of it himself, and now he's watching Dunaway start to put it together.

"He's gonna get some feature wins," Tommy said. "He finished second to me there Saturday, and he was hot on my bumper."

That three-way points battle could make the rest of the season very interesting. But for Tommy, the bigger immediate question is what happens next weekend...

The Bill Secrest Memorial is coming up Saturday, August 22. Fifty laps. $500 to win... and Tommy's never finished it.

He's had DNFs every time he's attempted the race. This year, though? He's feeling different.

"Bill Secrest Memorial, 50-lap, $500 to win. Hell yeah!"

That's about as enthusiastic as you can get, and there's a reason for it.

"This is the best the car's felt all year," Tommy said. "I think it's the best I've ever had a car feeling so far, you know, since I've been racing."

So while Tommy gets ready to chase down a race that has escaped him every time he's tried it, there's another reason to tune in to At The Track this Thursday. You're going to get to hear from the guy behind the wheel who's suddenly carrying some serious momentum, and if Saturday night was any indication, he's got plenty to talk about.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Tommy Gorman's story isn't what he's trying to accomplish before the end of this season... it's what he's thinking about doing after it.

Tommy has a championship on his mind right now. He wants to finish this season on top, but after that, he's considering stepping away from chasing points. Not from racing... from points racing, because his son is getting ready to start racing himself.

He'll be 11 years old by turn of the next season, and Tommy wants to spend some of his time getting the next generation ready to climb behind the wheel. The plan is to start him in a go-kart, let him learn the ropes and teach him the things that don't necessarily show up on a setup sheet:

How to drive around other people. How to race clean. How to understand what the people around you are doing. How to be a racer before you worry about being a winner.

His son's already around the race car almost every Saturday, helping the team and soaking in everything he can. Tommy thinks he's got the makings of a pretty damn good racer.

"He's a smart kid," Tommy said. "He plays football, he plays baseball, he plays all sports that he can. And then he's always at the racetrack about every Saturday helping us with the race car."

The interesting thing is that Tommy isn't saying he's hanging up the helmet. Far from it. He still wants to race... he still wants to win... he still wants to run Jackson County Speedway. He still wants to chase the tracks and races he's never been able to conquer. He just isn't sure he wants every weekend to feel like a job.

"Racing for points is a job," Tommy said. "And I mean, I'm having fun right now, but I feel like I'd have more fun if I didn't race for points."

And that could open up an entirely different chapter. Without a points championship dictating every Saturday night, Tommy could potentially travel more. Hit different tracks. Try different events. And, perhaps most importantly, spend more time with his son as he begins his own racing journey.

Jackson County Speedway's high on that list. Tommy loves the place, and there's more than just a racing history there for him. His uncle's final race before he passed away was at Jackson. Tommy's finished on the podium there multiple times, but there's still one thing he hasn't been able to check off the list... Apple City Victory Lane at Jackson County Speedway.

"I definitely wanna race Jackson again. I definitely wanna get a win there," Tommy said. "That was something my uncle was never able to do was get a win there."

That's the kind of goal that goes beyond a trophy, and if Tommy does decide to take a step back from points racing next year, there will be more opportunities to chase it.

Although, as Tommy himself admitted, there's one final person who gets a say in all of this. His crew chief. His wife, Kayla.

When I joked with him that maybe she was going to be a crew chief in more than just the mechanical sense, Tommy didn't hesitate.

"Oh yeah, she's the boss, man."

Because if Kayla decides they're racing for points next season? Well...

"I got a wife that loves racing, so if she says we're racing for points, well, I guess we're racing for points."

Fair enough. For now, though, the mission is much simpler: Enjoy this one, build on it, go after the Bill Secrest Memorial, and see just how far this newly dialed-in "mini late model" four-cylinder machine can take him.

Because two weeks ago, Tommy Gorman showed that the changes were working. Saturday night, he finally got the checkered flag to prove it. Now he's carrying momentum into a race he's never finished. Maybe, just maybe, the best part of Tommy Gorman's 2026 season hasn't even started yet.

Congratulations, Tommy! From the first win of the season to whatever comes next, we'll be watching.

Photo courtesy Tommy Gorman. Photo credits to Red Bomb Graphics.