Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Richards In Control at East Bay

Josh Richards may be driving for a different team in 2017, but the results produced by both the Best Motorsports team and himself look very much like they did last year. Richards started in the front row and after trailing Davey Johnson for a few laps, Josh blew by the leader and led the rest of the event, comfortably in control as night two of the WinterNationals at East Bay Raceway Park were concluded.

With some of his toughest competition either dropping by the wayside during the event or remaining sitting in the pits, Richards is getting valuable time to shake down his new ride and at the same time haul in a little more cash before the pits for the Lucas Oil Series fire back up on Thursday.

Forty Six cars signed in to race for Tuesday night's event with every single driver that raced Monday back for the second night along with two new entries. They included Michigan driver Nick Kurtz who was last seen at Lake City on Sunday and local weekly driver Shan Smith. However, two drivers did drop out after hot laps with both Brian Shirley and Todd Frank parking their entries. Shirley is getting dangerously low on motors already with well over a week of World of Outlaws point racing yet to do while Frank broke in warm ups and was not seen the rest of the night.

Earlier I talked to the Southeastern Iowa driver who still has ties to his native Wisconsin with most of his business interests being in the Green Bay area. He did tell me that he now has in place a good crew of workers running things there and that he doesn't have to make weekly trips back to the Badger state as he was having to do after he moved to Iowa.

As far as his racing plans for 2017, it looks to be a busy season for both him and his racing sons. Todd has a second son who will join Gunnar driving crate Late Models and it sounds like both sons and Todd will race weekly at the Lee County Speedway in Donnellson Iowa. The sons also plan to race their crates at Peoria and Quincy while Todd will run his Super Late Model at those two tracks when the Super Lates are on the schedule.

Fans are still waiting to see several of the cars in the pits actually hit the race track. Bloomquist's car remains in the hauler as he seeks medical assistance for an infection while the Bowyer cars were unloaded earlier this afternoon for maintenance and then bundled back up in their trucks. Colton Flinner continues to wait on a motor for his car and the back up car of Michael Lake, slated to be driven by Doug Horton, remains under wraps. Rumors continue to circulate that Jonathan Davenport may make an appearance later this week and that Brandon Overton is being pressured to come race with the Lucas Oil group, given that he is the current point leader after racing in Georgia last weekend.

Dustin Linville was able to get his car repaired to race on Tuesday after slamming the wall in time trials last night. However, there were plenty of other drivers that will have much work to do before Wednesday. Gregg Satterlee had to roll out a back up car after hammering the wall and local favorite Kyle Bronson also tried to knock down the wall in his heat which caused extensive damage to his Rocket chassis.

The track was much heavier than it was on Monday which forced track and series officials to conduct extensive track packing and hot lap sessions that resulted in the first race not hitting the track until about forty five minutes after the scheduled starting time. There also were more wrecks during the racing action that produced a number of torn up race cars including the most spectacular that saw Steve Francis park his new car on top of Frank Heckenast's mount in the middle of a multi car wreck on a restart during the feature event.

It was so humid during the night that the track never did even begin to dry out and one positive of that was that there was none of the dust of Monday night's show to be had in the grandstand on Tuesday. This also resulted in some real "hammer down" racing throughout the night and the feature race saw about as many DNF's as there were cars that went the distance.

It was interesting watching the pre race activity in the pits, particularly as it pertained to the tires used by the teams. All teams had to bring their tires to the tech area where they were inspected, serial numbers recorded and they were then spray paint marked by series officials. All teams are allowed only four tires for qualifying and heat race action and if they damage one, it must be brought to the Lucas Oil officials for an OK before a replacement can be used. The teams are then allowed four new tires for feature race action. All this is done in an effort to keep a handle on the whole tire issue and attempt to curb costs somewhat.

Veteran Tim Dohm always seems to run well at East Bay and he did so again Tuesday with a strong second place finish. At one point he seemed to be making up time on Richards but then in the last half dozen laps or so Richards once again picked up the pace and pulled away.

David Breazeale has one of his best runs ever against major competition on Tuesday as he raced in the top five throughout the event and did indeed nail down a top five finish, edging out Tyler Erb for the spot.

Off the top of my head, a few drivers that were expected to do good here this week and so far have not shone too much would include Mason Zeigler, Tim McCreadie, Boom Briggs and Dennis Erb.

I continue to be very impressed with the fifteen and sixteen year old duo of Michael Lake and Hudson O'Neal. Both of them were in the top ten again Tuesday and for O'Neal, this came despite the fact that he rolled to a halt on lap two after starting in the fourth row and came back up through the field. Both of these young drivers show absolutely no fear with O'Neal being an absolute "chip off the block" of his hard driving father Don.

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