Race Weekend Central

DGM Racing Scores Double Top 10 at Atlanta

HAMPTON, Ga. – Mario Gosselin, former ARCA Menards Series driver and now team owner of DGM Racing, was helping his pit crew load a car into the top of the hauler after Saturday night’s (March 19) NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

When Frontstretch caught up with the veteran racer, the 50-year-old jumped down from a five-foot high hauler loader and hustled over with the biggest grin of anyone in the garage.

The car he was loading was Mason Massey’s No. 91 Chevrolet. That car and Kyle Weatherman‘s No. 92 had just scored the team’s first double top 10 in over a year, with Massey finishing sixth and Weatherman eighth.

“We’re a 20th-place team as far as where we should be,” Gosselin told Frontstretch. “Everybody works their guts out. We put in a lot of hours. Who would’ve thought a small team from Lake Wales could come to Atlanta and get two top 10s?”

The small team from Lake Wales, Fla., only has 26 top 10s in its eight-year-old existence that includes 447 total starts. Alex Labbe, in the team’s third entry Saturday, finished 19th, placing all three cars inside the top 20 for the first time this season.

It was Georgia-native Massey’s first career series top 10. It was almost his first top five, too, as he came one spot short in sixth.

“It definitely feels like a win,” Massey told Frontstretch. “I feel kind of emotional right now. We’ve been through so much trying to get to this point.”

For Weatherman, it was only his second career top 10. His last came almost two years ago.

“Two cars in the top 10 is incredible,” Weatherman told Frontstretch. “This sport is such a momentum-based sport. These guys have been working hard. To see some results is very cool.”

Atlanta recently reconfigured its 1.5-mile oval into a higher-banked and narrower superspeedway-like track. In fact, it’s new side-by-side drafting racing product is something akin to Talladega Superspeedway, which so happens to be where DGM earned its most recent double top 10 in 2020.

The change meant chaos, and near the end of the night, there was plenty of it — but not until the end.

There were no cautions for incidents throughout the first two stages of the race, and with that meant the typical players of the Xfinity Series were running up front. The likes of powerhouse teams such as JR Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Kaulig Racing and Richard Childress Racing occupied most of the top 10 throughout the entirety of the event.

See also
Landon Cassill, AJ Allmendinger Lead Kaulig's Charge to Front at Atlanta

But with 60 laps to go in the final stage, a multi-car crash broke out. Then another did, and another.

With the lead cars wrecking and the Atlanta attrition rate increasing, slowly but surely, the DGM cars rose through the ranks.

With so many unknowns about the new Atlanta configuration, and no past notes to use, even the powerhouse teams were scrambling to find something in their setups that might work.

“It’s insane. It’s probably the craziest track I’ve ever raced on,” Massey said about the reconfiguration. “The drafting on a mile-and-a-half is crazy.”

Gosselin, however, knew exactly what to do. He said that instead of using a traditional superspeedway setup like many other teams, he looked back at a Michigan International Speedway setup that was used after the 2-miler was last repaved.

Whatever he saw in it, he liked, and he put it in all three of the DGM Chevrolets on Saturday night.

It was working well, as by the end of the night, combined with help from the race’s high attrition rate, both Massey and Weatherman were on the shell of the top 10.

With one more multi-car crash and a double-overtime attempt, both cars found themselves in the top 10.

While Ty Gibbs was celebrating on the finish line of Atlanta and the JGR team partied in the victory lane, DGM Racing made a victory lane of their own right there on pit road, surrounded by friends and family all.

They hadn’t won, but they sure did feel like it.

About the author

Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a First Lieutenant in the US Army.

Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneLT

Sign up for the Frontstretch Newsletter

A daily email update (Monday through Friday) providing racing news, commentary, features, and information from Frontstretch.com
We hate spam. Your email address will not be sold or shared with anyone else.

4 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Kurt Smith - Ex-Frontstretch Staff

Another Talladega? Great! Nothing like winners being determined entirely by luck and massive wrecks with cars going into the catch fence! Plenty of excitement though, which is apparently always NASCAR’s goal.

I swear, how great this sport could be if someone other than the France family was running it.

Bill B

I thought the same thing when I saw those “big ones”…..
“Great, another pack racing track. Just what we need.”

I hate crapshoot races.

Echo

It’s a bubba track

Echo

Attrition is working for bubba

Share via