After winning 13 races at The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and getting to Victory Lane 20 times in 22 races this year, confidence is sky high for California’s Jeffrey Peterson.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Peterson said of his season. “Every time I win one, I just kind of laugh just in disbelief that we can keep doing it.”
Peterson won the first 13 races in the Late Model division at the Bullring and was one race away from a perfect season. He was taken out in a crash in the final race, but he had such a big lead in the points, it didn’t matter. He won the track championship in the Limited Pro Late Model division by 58 points for his second title at the NASCAR Local Racing Series Powered by O’Reilly Auto Parts track.
Peterson said he and the team “far exceeded expectations” for the season. In six years racing full-time at Vegas, he’s always been fast, and even won six out of 14 races in his prior championship season in 2023. But he said, “this year, to rattle off the streak that we had was just nothing short of incredible.”
He credited his team with giving him the best car week after week.
“It’s the car that we’ve got,” Peterson said. “I think just no matter who’s driven it, that thing’s been up front. Lenny White works his butt off on the thing and it honestly makes me look a lot better than I really am.”
RELATED: 2026 NASCAR Local Racing Series standings
One thing Peterson said the team did that set them apart from others was putting a focus on long-run speed. When the track held practice on Fridays, he’d do 30-lap runs to make sure the car was consistent enough to last the entire race. Despite only setting fast time in qualifying twice this season, he was able to make his way through traffic in the features because his car was always so consistently fast.
“I can run almost a repetitive lap for the entire main event, which really helped us out,” he said. “That also helped us stay out of trouble, allowed us to kind of separate ourselves from the pack so when there’s a lot of tight racing going on and stuff and those guys would all fall off, I would stay the consistent speed and be able to kind of create a little gap and make our chances of surviving the night that much better.”
Peterson races for a team owned by Clay Wooster, the same owner Peterson’s dad drove for in the 1980s. After Peterson spent his childhood watching his dad race, Wooster put him in a race car for the first time when Peterson was 18.
He’s been with Wooster ever since.
“I grew up around Clay,” Peterson said. “Clay’s like a second father to me. It’s really cool we can go out and do this together, and the amount of success that we’ve had is something that I’ll cherish forever.
“It’s really cool to be able to do that, and Clay, he lives for racing. If they ran seven nights a week out here, he’d probably be at the race track seven nights a week.”
Peterson isn’t the only one in his house who is racing as often as possible. His wife Kayli races in the Modified division at the Bullring; she finished fourth in the points this season.
Kayli has been racing at Vegas for more than 20 years. The two met through racing, and Peterson said he gets just as much joy out of seeing her be successful.
“It’s definitely really cool,” he said. “I’ve been really fortunate to be with her when she became the first female to win a Super Late Model race out there, first female to win a Modified race. I feel like I get more excited and happier for her when she wins than I do when I win. Every time that I’ve been there for one of her wins I’ve actually cried, and I don’t cry a whole lot.”
Having Kayli to talk to about racing helps him on the track, too.
“It’s really cool her being involved in the racing. It really helps make it nice,” Peterson added. “She understands everything that I go through as well as I understand the things that she goes through, so it makes it easy in that aspect. We’ve got that kind of common hobby that we can bond over.”
Even though the race season is over at the Bullring, Peterson isn’t done. He and the team pay close attention to the NASCAR Local Racing Series regional, national and state points. He currently leads the Nevada state championship standings by 36 points, is second in the West Region standings and ranks 12th in the Division I national standings.
He’ll continue racing this summer at All American Speedway in Bakersfield, California to try to gain points, but he said it can be hard late in the year to find races where he can add to his championship total.
“We definitely pay attention to the regional stuff. National, not so much just because we don’t get the car count that the East Coast does,” Peterson said. “So, it’s really difficult to compete with the East Coast guys on that aspect. But the West Region and stuff, we really do pay close attention to that. We’ve won it twice now, so we’re hoping to hoping to be able to do it a third time this year. But car count kind of struggled throughout the middle of the season up at the Bullring in Vegas, so that really didn’t help us much. We just we need more cars.”
No matter who he’s racing against, Peterson is showing up to the track every week with sky-high confidence. He has 20 wins this season that helped him get there.
“We just focus on doing what we can do to control our outcome and wherever the chips may stack after that is it,” he said. “Just trying to be consistent all year and show up with the best car that we can.
“We go to the race track knowing that we’re the team to beat, and we’ve just got to keep on our A-game, keep doing what we’re doing, and try and minimize any sort of bad nights or off nights that we have. It all comes down to controlling what you can control yourself.”