Thursday, February 9, 2017

Strickler Continues to Dominate in Florida

After three nights of racing at the North Florida Speedway near Lake City, the Sunshine State Mod Tour headed south to the East Bay Raceway Park for another four nights of Modified racing at the third mile facility. After a hard fought twenty five lap main event, the outcome was the same as it was for two of the three nights at Lake City. Specifically, North Carolina's Kyle Strickler was again the winner. The B Mods raced for the first time ever at East Bay and Wisconsin's Kevin Adams was the winner of that event.

The first night of my Winter Florida racing experience was conducted under sunny some time and cloudy some times also skies and with extremely humid conditions. So humid in fact that the locals were commenting about how warm and muggy it was for this time of the year. Thunderstorms over night had dumped nearly an inch of rain in the area but other than some pit area puddles, the track was in fine shape for racing. Later we would see it turn from slimy to dry slick and then back again as the amazing Florida tides affected the track on an almost minute by minute basis.

Fifty two Modifieds signed in for racing action on Wednesday night, considerably higher than the car counts up at Lake City. The advantage was that East Bay had a solid field of their own cars that were willing to race and add to the program while the locals were almost nonexistent up at Lake City.

The first three nights of racing were already taxing for some racing teams with mechanical issues causing several to make some significant changes. Perhaps the most profound was that of Illinois' Ray Bollinger. While he normally races this series and then heads over to Volusia County for another week's worth of racing where he is always a strong competitor, this year he is already out of motors before ever getting to east Florida. Having blown up two power plants at North Florida, he was fortunate to catch a ride in Tennessee's Lucas Lee's back up car. After some feeling out problems early that saw him barely make the show, he moved up a number of places in the Modified main event.

Todd Shute was hoping back and forth between rides so much it was hard to keep up. He started out driving a car out of the stables of Oklahoma's Jessie Hoskins that was a claimer motor Modified and a new Longhorn chassis. Before the night was over he was in Hoskins' crate Modified and also drove Hoskins' B Mod too.

Wisconsin's Jason Gross had to change a motor before he even got a chance to race the car. He had Jason Miller drive the car for him at Lake City but they had trouble with their big motor. Miller flew home for work, Gross jumped into his own beak built Modified but with a WISSOTA spec engine under the hood which put him at a horsepower disadvantage as well as having to totally re scale the car.

The B Mods had only nine entrants, much like the short field that they also had in Lake City. The biggest problem with this class is that they don't race this class at many tracks in Florida, so most of the entrants came from far away. Even though they had only a handful of cars, entrants came from as far away as Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Illinois and Ontario Canada.

Just like every other sanctioning body, UMP has its idiosyncrasies when it comes to rules and teching of cars. They were very anal about body rules, requiring some changes that seemed petty to say the least. They are also quite restrictive on the shocks that the Modifieds can run yet the motor rules are about as wide open as you can get. Interestingly, crate motors are only allowed in the Modifieds here in Florida while during the rest of the season UMP has a crate only class. Yet the crate of Strickler has won three of four features so far and David Reutimann is sporting a crate motor in his B Mod that I'm predicting will win at least one feature before this series is complete. And while he didn't have a particularly good night on Wednesday, Iowa's Mike VanGenderen will be a strong competitor when the race distances get longer with "The Dutchman" also running a crate motor. 

Time trials set the fields for the Modified heats and when quick qualifier Brad Goff pulled out a "one", it meant the fields would be straight up off times. All six heats were won off the front row as the track was top side dominant early in the evening and everyone fought to position themselves in the high groove. This changed as the evening progressed with the track getting dry slick and slippery, even during the B Mod feature.

But then we were witness to the every changing surface of East Bay Raceway Park, courtesy of the changing tides. In just the few minutes between the two feature races, the track changed significantly, particularly in turns three and four where it got very "snotty" is just a few minutes time.

This changed the strategy significantly and led to a very entertaining Modified feature race. David Reutimann led for the first half of the feature with Strickler closing in on him. Eyes were on Kevin Adams who started twelfth and charged up into the top five by the halfway point of the race. Another quick caution and Adams was up to third. Then things got wild. Strickler dove low to try and pass Reutimann and he didn't clear him with the right rear of Kyle's car making solid impact on David's left front. Reutimann slipped up the track, with Strickler taking over the lead and Adams moving into second. Adams drove hard to try and catch the leader, but Strickler was strong and maintained a four length advantage to the finish. Reutimann and Strickler had some words after the finish and it was clear that Buzzie's son wasn't particularly pleased with the pass which should lead to an even more intense upcoming nights of racing. There were only two yellows in the feature and only five cars didn't see the checkered flag. All told, it was a very smooth night of racing with not many incidents to report.

Adams salvaged one feature win as he pulled away from Reutimann in the B Mod main and then had to withstand a strong challenge from Jason Garver until he slowed when he lost his power steering. Adams' win was his third of the four races the B Mods have run between here and North Florida. They brought their second car down in hopes of helping build up the B Mod field and are hoping to go home minus the motor which they hope to sell.

They got a little bit of a late start with the time trials and some extra packing of the track but once they got going, things moved along at a very crisp pace. with few breaks in the action and those being short ones, the final checked flag waved at 10:10 pm., making for a program that lasted just over two hours.

The crowd size seemed decent, particularly for a Wednesday night show with a good mix of local fans plus many that are in the area to either Winter or follow their favorite drivers. As the payoffs increase over the rest of the week, more competitors are expected to arrive also although I felt the Modified was very solid just as it was.

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