And The Winner Is...

Brian Daugherty raised his arms in triumph. Then he proudly displayed $800 in cash.

Port City Racing’s Integra Shocks technical representative emerged the winner of the World of Outlaws Late Model Series’s version of the ‘Biggest Loser’ contest, beating out four other familiar faces from the national tour in a five-week-long weight-loss battle. He cut the largest percentage of body weight among the entrants in the competition, which culminated with an official weigh-in on Thursday during an open-house/pig roast at Keyser’s Port City Racing in Coopersville, Mich.

A skinnier Brian Daugherty with his contest winnings.

“It was a sweet victory,” said Daugherty, a 38-year-old resident of Punxsutawney, Pa., known as ‘Little Brian’ in pit areas across the country. “I never had any doubts.”

Standing on one of car owner Dale Beitler’s electronic scales, Daugherty weighed 157 pounds. His initial weight at the start of the contest, which began on July 13 at Deer Creek Speedway in Spring Valley, Minn., was 183 pounds, giving him a body-weight-loss percentage of 14.207 percent.

Randall Edwards (Darrell Lanigan’s crew chief) finished second, going from 278 to 240 pounds. He dropped the most total weight, but his loss percentage was 13.669 percent.

Matt Barnes (car chief for Josh Richards) placed third after taking his weight from 223 to 197 pounds (11.65 percent). Driver Vic Coffey was fourth after going from 253 to 227 pounds (10.27 percent) and Robby Allen (Austin Hubbard’s chief mechanic) placed fifth with a 5.45 percent change in his weight (286 to 271).

The struggle to shed pounds went right down to the final moments before Thursday’s weigh-in at Port City Racing, where more than a dozen teams spent the night socializing before this weekend’s WoO LMS doubleheader at Winston Speedway in Rothbury, Mich., and Merritt Raceway in Lake City, Mich.

“He won it on the last day,” Barnes, 30, said of Daugherty. “We were all very, very close coming to the last day, and then Randall and Brian ran (around the Port City shop) and sweat pounds off while I had to ride in the truck all day. We got there last and I went right on the scale.”

“Here’s what happened,” analyzed Daugherty, who received $200 from each of his vanquished rivals for winning the contest. “I ate right and went to the gym for the last month, but (on Thursday) Randall was within one pound of me so he put a sauna suit on and went running. He went for a two-mile run and I just started following him, and that got me one extra pound. For every one extra pound I lose he had to lose three, so it just got too far for him.”

Edwards, 36, took solace in the fact that he lost the most pounds of the contestants. Coffey, 40, was happy to drop 26 pounds despite doing nothing but change his diet (“I didn’t do any exercising like those other guys”).

And Allen? He rationalized his failure to even crack the double-figure threshold in his body-weight-loss percentage.

“I like to eat,” quipped Allen, who is known as ‘Hoghead.’ “And I’m old – the oldest one in this deal. It’s hard for us old guys to lose weight. I’m sticking to that.”