Friday, June 30, 2017

Hancock County Speedway Has Racing Galore

If it's race cars you wanted to see with full fields in several classes and action across the board, then the place to be would have been the Hancock County Speedway on Tuesday, June 27th for their annual Salute to Veterans race which also featured the Hawkeye Dirt Tour for Modifieds as a part of the show.

With promoter Joe Ringsdorf now retired, a new promotional group has now taken over the track but they wisely retained this event, which traditionally has been one of the biggest at the track all year along with their "Night of Stars" series of races. While there are some new folks working for the track, they have retained others including veteran announcer Chad Meyer who probably gets to as many races in this part of the state as anyone. He teamed with Ryan Clark  Tuesday to provide knowledgeable commentary and an occasional bad joke or two. Just kidding.

With one hundred and forty three race cars signed in to race, by my count, you kind of knew that it was going to be a long night and prepared for it. With the strong winds blowing however, it was brutal on the race track and I doubt that there could have been anything done that would have saved it any more than was possible. I counted twenty nine races and all had plenty of cars in them. That, folks, is a lot of racing in one night.

There were a lot of preliminary heats and B features needed to whittle down the big field and determine who would start the mains but eventually it was cut down to the top twenty four in Mods, Stock Cars and Sport Mods with all the Sport Compacts and Hobby Stocks taking the green.

The best feature race of the night was the Stock Cars feature which had a huge gaggle of cars batting for the lead positions. A yellow with only three laps to go was devastating for Calvin Lange who had led to that point. At the end, he got shuffled all the way back to sixth as Dustin Larson emerged the winner.

The other crazy finish was in the Sport Mods where the two leaders started beating on each other in the last couple of laps, ruthlessly trying to lift each other off the ground, and Austin Luellen kept his wits about it and drove past both of them for the win.

Dominating performances were turned in by Tyler Droste, Nate Coopman and Cody Nielsen to win the other three main events.

It was a long, long night of racing and almost more than a fan would want to see. However, when you are putting up as much money in all classes as this race provided, it is a compliment to the track when you say that there were almost too many cars to run off a smooth show that would fit within most people's time limits. Tuesday's show ran at over four hours and that is getting a bit long. One thing I would say, the 7 pm starting time seems about right but when you hot lap so many cars, the real racing doen't get started until almost forty five minutes later. To start at 7 pm, if you plan on hot lapping, then the hot laps need to start much earlier than they did.

One victim of the long show was the fireworks display. They did have some very nice fireworks but most on hand didn't get to see them. Many had taken their leave after the Modifieds were done and even a fireworks fan like myself watched them over my shoulder as I headed to the parking lot, a whipped "puppy" after twenty nine races. 

Thanks to Four Wide Racing Promotions for the Media Credentials. I must apologize to them and the other readers of this blog for the lateness of this report. While I can never hope to keep up with the thoroughness of "the boss" here, I usually at least can match his promptness. However, I have been sick as "a dog" for the last couple of days and everything has been put on hold because of that.

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