Columbus Speedway might be more than 750 miles from Josh Richards’ home in Shinnston, W.Va., but the track always will hold a prominent place on his résumé.

It was at the high-banked, one-third-mile oval known as The Bullring where Richards took a major step toward his superstar status as the two-time defending World of Outlaws Late Model Series champion.

When Richards leads the WoO LMS contingent to Columbus Speedway later this week for the inaugural $20,000-to-win ‘Cash Cow 100′ weekend that opens the 2011 season, the soon-to-be 23-year-old sensation will think back to the memorable night he spent at the track nearly five years ago.

On Aug. 26, 2006, Richards won the first WoO LMS event contested at Columbus. Then a rising 18-year-old talent fresh out of high school and in his second full season as a regular on the national tour, he pulled off a dramatic late-race pass of eventual 2006 series champion Tim McCreadie, of Watertown, N.Y., to earn the second WoO LMS triumph of his budding career.

“I remember that race well,” said Richards, who celebrates his 23rd birthday March 22. “We won our heat and the dash (to earn the pole position for the 50-lap A-Main) and led (the feature) until McCreadie passed us. I had to pass him back and finally got by him with a few laps to go.

“Back at that stage of my career, that was a huge accomplishment. To pass a guy like McCreadie for the lead right at the end of the race — man, that was cool.”

The win at Columbus was the second in the first 93 starts of Richards’ WoO LMS career, which he launched in 2004 by running a partial schedule in his father Mark’s Rocket Chassis house car before going full time in 2005 and capturing the Rookie of the Year award.

Since then, he has won 26 A-Mains in 177 starts, which has him tied with Steve Francis, of Ashland, Ky., atop the tour’s win list since 2004, at 28 victories.

The 2006 show in Columbus will stand as a turning point for Richards. He led the first 32 laps of that Columbus A-Main before McCreadie slid under him to assume command. But after a caution flag on lap 46 provided a final opportunity, Richards heeded the signals of his father, Mark, who was watching the race from the track’s infield, and used the inside groove to regain the lead from McCreadie heading into turn three with two laps remaining.

“The track was kind of rough on the bottom that night,” Mark Richards said. “Josh had run through the holes for a while, but then he moved out of them and McCreadie caught up and got by him. Josh just got back up on the wheel, went through the holes and passed him back late in the race for the win.

“That was probably one of Josh’s first lessons in how aggressive you need to be to get the win. I’m sure that race showed him that if you want to win, you have to get up on the wheel and drive a little harder to get it done. That’s been more or less his trademark throughout the last few years. When he has to be aggressive, he’s aggressive.”

Richards saw his future come into focus after the win at Columbus. He went from a ninth-place finish in the 2006 points standings to sixth in 2007, second in 2008, and first in both 2009 and 2010, becoming the first driver in the modern era of the series to win the title twice.

“We kind of struggled from the beginning to the middle of 2006, but toward the end of the year we kind of picked up our program,” Richards said. “Our program had started to get on track, we were racing better together as a team everywhere we went and everything clicked that night (at Columbus). It’s a fast little bullring, and I guess it just kind of fit my style. I’ve always liked places where you have to get up on the wheel and run hard.

“It definitely made me realize how hard you have to drive to win. Everybody you race with is so tough and they’re all gonna give a 110 percent, so you just have to be that person who goes a little harder.”

Richards hopes he can convert that extra desire into a big victory in the ‘Cash Cow 100,’ a blockbuster two-day program that brings him – and the WoO LMS – back to Columbus for the first time since March 2007. He captured the long-awaited first 100-lap win of his career last year at Mohawk International Raceway in Akwesasne, N.Y., and he’s ready to chase another at a furious, high-speed track that will present a supreme test to man and machine.

“I think it’s going to be a real tough race,” said Richards, who was 15th in his last WoO LMS start on March 24, 2007, at Columbus. “If the racing is like it was when we were there before, the racing is gonna be so hard it’s gonna be hard to manage your tires and your equipment for a hundred laps, especially if it’s got some traction to it.”

For more information on Josh Richards, visit www.joshrichards.com.