Home NASCAR A Small Team’s Best Finish in 40 Years: How Brayton Laster Made History for Wayne Peterson Motorsports

A Small Team’s Best Finish in 40 Years: How Brayton Laster Made History for Wayne Peterson Motorsports

Rhian Jones
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A Small Team’s Best Finish in 40 Years: How Brayton Laster Made History for Wayne Peterson Motorsports

Seventh place doesn’t usually make headlines, but Sunday at Springfield it was 40 years in the making. Brayton Laster’s career-best run gave Wayne Peterson Motorsports their best finish since 1984 and first lead-lap result since 2018.

Peterson has been running ARCA cars since the early 1980s, but staying afloat on a shoestring budget means taking two steps back for every step forward.

Forty Years of Grinding

Wayne Peterson’s now 87 and still showing up to the track. The former Army paratrooper from Tennessee grew up poor in Alabama, built his first race car from a 1948 Hudson, and worked as a gasman for Lee Petty before starting his own ARCA team.

Peterson’s been running cars since 1984, but funding has always been the problem. While other teams buy fresh motors and backup cars, Peterson fixes what breaks and hopes to make the next race. The team hasn’t had a finish this good in four decades.

The Pizza Delivery Driver

Brayton Laster is 22 and delivers pizza to pay for racing. He started in go-karts at eight and worked his way through Thunderbirds and stock cars, learning to stretch every dollar.

“I come from a dirt late model background, so we know we can do a lot with a little here,” Laster said after Sunday’s run. “Every race we try to find something to improve on, but it seems like we take one step forward and two steps back.”

That’s Peterson’s reality. While big teams show up with multiple cars and engineers, Peterson arrives with hope and spare parts. Laster’s dealt with mechanical failures all season, watching good runs disappear because of broken parts that funded teams never worry about.

When Everything Clicked

Sunday’s ARCA race at Springfield was chaos from the start. Rain washed out practice and qualifying, so everyone started blind and raced on points. Most drivers hate that. For Laster, it leveled the playing field.

The track got slick fast, the kind of surface that separates talent from equipment. Laster’s dirt background paid off while drivers with better cars struggled with handling. He stayed clean, avoided trouble, and let others make mistakes.

“Today, everyone on the team really prepared a good car,” Laster said. The seventh-place finish moved Peterson from 12th to 11th in owner points, just 17 behind Alex Clubb’s better-funded team.

While other drivers celebrated top-fives or complained about bad luck, Laster was heading to pizza with Peterson—a tradition the old man promised for any breakthrough run.

Teams like Peterson matter because they’re the backbone everyone forgets about. They keep the sport’s grassroots alive while fans focus on the million-dollar operations. They prove that determination can beat money, even if it takes 40 years.

For anyone who likes to , underdogs like Peterson represent the kind of value that makes racing interesting—teams with nothing to lose when everything lines up right.

Laster’s run also shows why dirt experience still matters. While other drivers treated Springfield like survival, Laster saw it as a chance to show skills you can’t buy.

Peterson heads to DuQuoin next, where Laster will try to keep this momentum going. Small teams rarely get long runs of good luck, but for one afternoon in Illinois, a pizza driver and an 87-year-old former paratrooper proved that racing dreams don’t expire.

After 40 years of waiting, even seventh place feels like winning.

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