Despite being just 20 years old, Chase Dowling has been on the Whelen Modified Tour circuit for the past four years.
Throughout his first two full-time seasons on the Tour, Dowling managed 15 top-10 finishes and became the youngest rookie of the year in Tour history.
But it wasn’t until he and Rob Fuller, the man at the helm of LFR Chassis, connected during the 2017 season that the journey to being Whelen Modified Tour championship contenders really got going. The Rob Fuller Motorsports-run team would race 2017 on a part-time basis.
It was Fuller who saw the talent Dowling possessed, and wanted to get him into a winning ride.
“When I first started talking to Chase, I just wanted him to get into some good stuff,” Fuller says. “He was with a family-owned team and looking for some opportunities. He was running SKs full-time, and I said ‘Hey, let’s go run my car part-time.’ He’s a young kid who’s got some talent, and it worked out where he got on board.”
The third race the team ran that season, the Thompson 125, saw Stephen Kopcik join the team as Dowling’s crew chief. It was evident from the get-go that Kopcik would mesh well with Dowling, both of whom are only 20 years old.
“Chase was just a friend of mine before,” says Kopcik. “He called me up to give him a hand and the first race we went to, we worked really well together.”
While the team wrecked in that race, they also showed plenty of speed, which was later proven by the two to be no fluke.
Throughout the season, Dowling and Kopcik continued to improve the pace of the No. 15 car, culminating in the team’s best effort in the season-concluding World Series 150 at Thompson. There, Dowling grabbed his first career Tour pole, and missed out on his first win by only half a car-length to Timmy Solomito.
As a whole, 2017 was a career year for Dowling. In just nine starts, he raced to five top-five finishes, led 21 laps, which dwarfed his prior career total of eight, and started inside the top-10 in all but one race. At the conclusion of 2017, Dowling, Kopcik and Fuller agreed to make the switch to full-time for 2018, largely thanks to sponsorship from 15-40 Connection.
“We [Dowling, Kopcik, Fuller] just kind of sat down at the end of the 2017 season,” says Dowling of the decision to run full-time. “We got our sponsors together and pretty much made it happen. We knew we’d be pretty good.”
The team started strong, leading laps in each of the first three races, along with winning a pole at Stafford. As the season progressed, it became clear that Dowling would be a legitimate championship contender.
Dowling currently sits second in the points standings, 74 markers back of Justin Bonsignore. He has led 290 laps, third-most among Tour drivers in 2018. Only twice this season has Dowling failed to finish inside the top-10.
Fuller’s been having a pretty good year for himself, too. Not only is the car he owns in second place, but two of the cars LFR Chassis has built currently sit first and third in the points standings, driven by Bonsignore and Doug Coby. Both of those teams have been to victory lane this season. Bonsignore has torn up the Tour, winning seven times, while Coby has a win of his own back at Stafford in August.
It continues an amazing run of success for Fuller’s company that hasn’t stopped since LFR joined the Tour back in 2014. LFR Chassis has won each championship with Coby in the three seasons prior to 2018. Bonsignore has picked up the baton for LFR in 2018 and appears very likely to make it four straight years that a car built by LFR Chassis has been part of the championship-winning team.
“It’s huge,” says Fuller on the dominance of LFR Chassis on the Tour since 2015. “A lot of people have said ‘Oh, you’ve gotta get in the SKs,’ but that wasn’t my goal… I wanted to get the Tour guys happy and win championships and then work my way down, start looking at SK guys, looking at ROC guys, knowing that we’ve got the best record in the highest level of competition in the open wheel modified division.”
But remaining ever-elusive for Fuller’s own team was a win of its own. During the Icebreaker 150 at Thompson, Dowling appeared to have the race in hand until a restart violation with a handful of laps to go cost the team victory. The Spring Sizzler at Stafford saw Dowling lead 69 of the race’s 200 laps, only to finish second. It was one of the four runner-up finishes the team has garnered this season, including a heartbreaker at Loudon in July which saw Dowling get ousted by Bobby Santos III by a scant 14 thousandths of a second.
So of course, redemption was on the minds of Dowling and Kopcik as the Tour headed to the Magic Mile again this past weekend for the inaugural Musket 250. Not only was the race the longest-ever run in Tour history, it also paid out a $25,000 check to the winner and $100 for each lap a team led.
Dowling won the pole, and remained up front throughout the race, leading 54 of the race’s 250 laps, earning the team an extra $5,400. But as the finish grew nearer, Dowling could not get himself into an ideal place to make the winning move. Then, on the last lap, everything went the No. 15’s way for once.
Going into turn three, the two leaders, Bonsignore and Ryan Preece, were battling hard for the win. The two cars made contact and slid up the racetrack. Dowling, who was in fourth when he took the white flag, swept underneath the carnage and cruised to his first-ever victory.
“I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet,” said Dowling after taking the checkered flag. “Every other track we went to this year, we finished second a ton of times, and it was just one of those things just waiting to happen, and it finally happened.”
It may have taken almost two years for this team to finally get its first win with Dowling behind the wheel and Kopcik atop the pit box, but they have no intention of waiting two more for another checkered flag. With a championship almost mathematically impossible at this point, the goal for the season’s final two races at Stafford and Thompson? Win.
“The goal is to win them,” says Kopcik. “Stafford is probably one of Chase’s best tracks, as well as Thompson… I think we’ve got everything here to do it, we’ve just gotta get it done.”
This team has no guaranteed future beyond the end of this season, according to Fuller. Whether the team returns to compete full-time in 2019 is yet to be known.
No matter what happens, however, Fuller is proud to have taught Dowling and Kopcik about more than just racing.
“They’re very serious about what they do,” Fuller says. “I think they understand the amount of money I’ve invested to give them the opportunity they have… I don’t want to just teach them about racing. I want to teach them about how to respect the people that help them out. I want to teach them how to deal with sponsors.”
“We’re taking the lap money we got, five to six thousand dollars, [I told them] ‘You guys can do what you want with it’, and the first thing they said is ‘Hey, we gotta give some to the guys’,” Fuller concludes. “When they say things like that, it makes me proud because I feel like I’ve brought them up the past couple of years.”
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