Once again a quick turnaround time to hit the highway has left my reports in arrears so we'll once again do some catching up on night two of the World of Outlaws Late Models opening weekend at Redd Griffin's Screven Motor Speedway Complex.
The crowd was much better for Saturday's action as the parking lot filled early and on this night, all the official presence was needed to get everyone parked in an orderly manner and in the facility which doesn't have a huge parking lot and borders on a sixty five mile per hour highway where one wouldn't dare park along the edge of the road.
The activity was booming from all parks of the complex on Saturday as drag racing was going on at the eighth mile strip on the North end of the property, the karts were racing on the little dirt track that borders the pits while the circle track boys(and girls) were preparing their machines for another show on Saturday night.
While no new Late Models pulled in on Saturday, all forty six returned from Friday night's show so a solid field of cars was on hand again. The three support classes fielded a total of thirty six cars split almost evenly between the three groups. Then there were the Renegade Fours, which were parked in every nook and cranny of the grounds with a total of around ninety of them. They held first round qualifying(which I didn't see) after the rest of the show on Friday night and then had another qualifying session at mid afternoon on a dry track that sent the red dust flying in all directions. The track was then prepared for the evening show and just like Friday night, it was over watered and as the sun set and the evening cooled down, it took quite a while to get the track in any kind of racing shape.
They had a very nice detailed schedule broken down to the minute for all on track activities prepared and posted for both nights. Unfortunately, it didn't take long either night for the schedule to get blown to heck and while the first race was an hour and a half late starting on Friday, that was improved slightly on Saturday as they were only an hour late getting the first race on the track.
It was interesting talking to some of the Late Model teams before the racing began on Saturday. Some of them were telling me about the practice night on Thursday where some of the high financed, very technical teams were attaching some kind of information collecting equipment on each wheel of their Late Models and then, after each practice session was complete, they would collect the data and do adjusting on shocks, springs, etc. It will not be that long before it will be necessary to have an engineer on staff to for every top Late Model team, just like NASCAR. And since most people in the pits understand how this process makes their cars faster but don't have the knowledge personally to carry this type of information gathering out themselves, they will have to be hiring high priced engineers for their teams. Who would have thought short track racing in the mud would come to this! This is a very slippery slope that that Late Model racing is clearly on and no one seems ready to do anything about it. And the expensive alone will go a long way in killing the sport for many.
As far as the Late Model program itself, there was an unpredictable flavor to the program Saturday with some surprise drivers qualifying and racing well and a couple of the big names not doing so well in time trials. And since qualifying is by far the biggest determining factor in how a night goes with the straight up starts, the night found drivers like Richards and Clanton digging all night to make up for poor qualifying efforts. After a solid dose of straight up starts over the course of this trip in all classes, I can hardly wait to see some kind of handicapping being used again, whether it be point invert, redraw, whatever.
North Carolina's Chris Ferguson was blinding fast at the beginning of the night but he wore out his tires(I hate that tire management has become a part of a fifty lap feature race!) and old pro Rick Eckert was able to make a pass on him and take the win as shortly after, Ferguson got a flat tire and called it a night. Boom Briggs was running great Saturday, maybe the best I've ever seen him run and he finished a solid second with Jason Covert wrapping up a great weekend in third place at the finish. Richards came from sixteenth to seventh while Clanton didn't fare too well and was much farther behind.
The support divisions had one close feature race but far too many yellow flags than the number of cars in each class should warrant. And as for the Renegade Fours, their program was quite interesting to same the least. After two rounds of qualifying, they were split into two qualifying races of around forty cars apiece that ran between preliminary events for the Late Models. At fifteen laps or fifteen minutes, neither made it more than a handful of laps due to a multitude of crashes. Their feature race was held as the last event of the evening, and with it already being 11:30 p.m. and the temperature having fallen to thirty three degrees, only a handful of people were left to watch their one hundred lap main event. I was not one of those that remained. As I headed out of the parking lot, I heard the racing begin to be followed almost immediately by the first yellow flag slow down. They did announce that due to the cold and the late hour, the first eighty laps would count yellow flag laps and then they would race the last twenty, if that's how it worked out. I did hear later that the pole sitter did win the race but I found out no other specifics. Among the few familiar names in the class racing were Iowa's Joe Zrostlik and one of the Thompson's from Sioux City along with Minnesota's Nate and Jerry Coopman.
I found the Late Model racing at Screven to be very entertaining as Screven is a fast track and the action is very intense. However, especially being spoiled by the one class, quick programs at East Bay, the evenings at Screven were long, delay filled and cold. I thought the Outlaws did a good job with their part of the program including running things off quickly and their new announcer did a fine job. However, I would suggest that they take stronger control over what else is presented with their shows as a long, dragged out program with too many support classes does nothing to help their presentation or leave a positive memory in the mind of the fans on hand.
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