Round three at East Bay Raceway Park and round six overall of the Sunshine State Mod Tour was contested on Friday night, February 10th and for the first time during the tour, the local fans had something to cheer about as finally one of their own broke through to gain a feature win.
Jeff Mathews, a former track champion at this facility, used the newly gained throttle control added with his switch this week to a crate motor along with solid handling characteristics in his new Elite chassis from David Stremme to drive past Kevin Adams and win his first feature race of the series and bring the local fans to life. So far this week, they have been sitting on their hands as the locals haven't done well, but Mathews changed that on Friday with a strong run that left him as a definite threat to win the big money in Saturday night's seventy five lap feature.
In the B Mods, local driver David Reutimann also broke through to take his first win of the series as he held off Adams for the win, putting two crate motors in victory lane.
Fifty four Modifieds took qualifying laps on Friday while track champion Steve Miller scratched out before the racing action began. The powerful two car team of Trent Young and David Mitchell from Kentucky made their first appearances of the week, local driver Matt Miller also made his first run and both Devin Dixon and Tyler Nicely pulled out back up cars among changes that took place on Friday night.
It was a perfect night for Mathews as he was quick qualifier of the night and also won his heat race. However, he redrew as poor as possible and was forced to start sixth in the main event. For the third straight night however, the quick qualifier drew a "one" on the invert and the heats were started once again straight up off the time trials. One has to wonder just how many different numbers there were in the can!
Each night the "Clay by the Bay" has gotten drier and drier and Friday found some of us begging that the tide would come in and ram some moisture back up into the racing surface. While everyone was hugging the bottom on Thursday, Friday's show found the track starting to take on a lot of rubber and it produced a high speed train. Adams was able to use the outside line, where he seems to totally dominate over the field, to move up from the second row and drive by early leader Kenny Wallace for the lead. Mathews moved up quickly and disposed of Wallace and moved in on Adams.
As the track started to take more rubber, the drivers started working down on the track and Adams was clearly too tight in the corners as Mathews challenged him for the lead. Jeff actually slipped under Adams once, only to have the yellow save him. However, Mathews quickly challenged again and Adams didn't have the corner speed to fight off Mathews and once in front, Jeff promptly pulled away from the field.
With it rubbered up, after that it turned into a high speed train with the only action being when the leaders caught lapped traffic which wouldn't move out of their groove, and Adams, Wallace and Kyle Strickler had a three car scramble to try and fight through the traffic. Wallace was able to sneak into second but after a late race yellow set up a two lap race to the finish, Adams was able to retake the spot. Afterward, Wallace and Adams seemed to be having an earnest discussion, perhaps about that particular point of the race, and as in any discussion with Wallace, he was doing the majority of the talking. In his interview afterward, Wallace called it the best track of the three nights, so I guess his opinions and mine are slightly divergent when it comes to track surfaces.
Reutimann started on the pole of the B Mod feature and led all the way. Adams did everything he could to try and generate enough momentum to drive around David, but with the track as it was and the B Mods just not having the immense horsepower of the Mods, he wasn't able to edge past into the lead, although he gave it his best and refused to just follow the leader around the track. Jason Garver, who I found out Friday was disqualified from his second place finish on Thursday due to a motor issue that was found, perhaps in response to the complaints about lack of teching, came back with a legal motor and finished third.
While they manage to scrape together enough cars to have two heats Friday, the response, or lack there of, by the area cars has been disappointing. When they set the rules for this division, they allowed four link suspension cars, essentially the same cars as the Modifieds, to race because that's what they normally run in the class down here. Now that few of them have even bothered to show up to race, track management has already stated that next year only three link suspension cars will be allowed to compete, which should open up the action to many more Northern drivers, who were hesitant to enter this year, feeling that they were over matched against regular Modifieds with down sized motors.
Certainly one of the biggest stories of the night came after the final checkered flag was waved when fourth place finisher Kyle Strickler was disqualified for failing to report to the tech area. This cost him dearly as the early week's dominating driver thus took himself out of the top six in points for the series here at East Bay which would have guaranteed him a starting spot on Saturday and now he will have to qualify for the feature. Those that will automatically make the main Saturday are Adams, Mathews, Wallace, Reutimann, Brad Goff and Mavrick Varnadore.
There was much concern among many drivers that if the track remains as it was for Friday's show, tire wear will be a huge problem and that no one will be able to run the distance without changing tires at some point. This could certainly scramble the race and perhaps lead to some rather unusual things going on. On a personal note, I feel that these Modifieds just weren't meant to be running in such long distance races where , in my opinion, boring things like tire management might turn out to be key. These cars were built and meant to be run in sprint type races, where you put the "hammer" down and go like the devil, not cruise around the track and try to save your tires. Such terms as "short pitting" should never be a part of the vocabulary of a dirt track Modified driver.
For Iowa race fans, I did get a chance to spend a few minutes with defending champion of this race, Mike VanGenderen. "The Dutchman" shocked the world when he won the seventy five lapper last year, hugging the inside groove with his crate car after coming out of a B feature. His first three nights at East Bay have been miserable for him so far. He is fighting his new Harris car and has been struggling miserably as he has been chasing it all over the track. He said that it just isn't fitting his driving style to this point and he feels he needs to modify his racing approach in order to make the car work. On a brighter note, he reports that all is in readiness for his tracks to open, the only down side being that with all his tracks taking on an early season busy schedule, his next opportunity to race after this weekend will likely be the Boone Frostbuster event.
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