I should have recognized that with it being Friday the thirteenth, some kind of mischievous or bizarre happenings were going to occur before the clock struck Midnight to announce the dawning of a new day. Sure enough, my first visit of 2017 to Scott Duval's Spring Lake Speedway near Unity Wisconsin was one for the books with just about any misfortune other than pestilence and famine taking place before a long, long night of racing was completed.
Friday night was night one of the third annual Autumn Clash to be held at Spring Lake Speedway. This was scheduled to be a two night show with full programs for six classes of racing on each night. Spring Lake Speedway was brought back to life by Duval a couple of years ago after the track sat vacant for a few years. Some of you may know it better for its interesting original name; that of the Monster Hall Raceway.
Duval has done a large amount of resurrecting and refurbishing of the grounds as the facility looks nothing like it did either originally or after it started to decay under some bad management and then neglect. He put a lot of money and "sweat equity" into the place and has made it come to life in a way that most, myself included, would never have imagined possible. Scott is a "talker" but he is also a "doer" and he has gotten the local communities back involved with the track and generated much interest in the place.
I got the tour of the place during the afternoon and saw some of his most recent upgrades that included a third suite that has been completed plus some VIP boxes also. In his plans for next year are a relocating of pit road so that the racers and fans don't have to travel down the same road into the place and his hope is to purchase some more land from the farmer next door to expand his pit parking.
If you've never been to Spring Lake, what you need to know is that it borders both a lake and a campground that used to be a part of the facility. The entrance road off the county highway goes through the campground and the main grandstand butts right up against Spring Lake. The idea to keep the big haulers out of the campground road is largely both a convenience issue for the fans plus a safety issue for the campers.
He is also working with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources that governs all Wisconsin bodies of water. He is planning on clearing out the shoreline(with the DNR blessing) and creating a walkway along the lake for race fans and also for campers to use. It will be very fan friendly when completed. One thing Scott is not short on and that is ideas.
Spring Lake Speedway is in central Wisconsin and sits wedged in between the operating areas of three different sanctioning bodies. To the East, virtually all the tracks are sanctioned by IMCA. To the North and West the tracks are all WISSOTA sanctioned track while to his Southwest along the Mississippi River, the tracks are USRA sanctioned. This positioning has been both a blessing and a curse to him. Trying to decide which, if any, sanctioning body to go on board with is both a political and tactical "hot potato." So what he has decided is to pretty much go with open rules in some classes and to follow WISSOTA rules in other classes. The Mods and B Mods(as he calls them) use general rules that allow cars from all sanctioning bodies to race while he runs WISSOTA rules for the Streets and Super Stocks. The Pure Stocks and Hornets use local track rules. It probably hurts him a little to not have a class appropriate for the Stock Cars but then also running the open rules probably keeps a few Modifieds away because those few USRA cars on hand sport a considerable advantage over the other Mods.
For this event he throws all three sanctioning B Mod groups together on their own tires and does the same with the Modifieds, evening giving the IMCA cars a big spoiler. The Stock Cars are allowed to run with the WISSOTA Streets and the Eastern Wisconsin version of Streets which definitely gives the Stock Cars an advantage but the familiarity of the local drivers helps even up the score.
As with just about every track in the Midwest this weekend, the weather was a worrisome variable. A number of storms drifted just to the South on Friday and the evening saw some clearing and racing was on as scheduled although it was reported the the heavy rains in eastern Wisconsin kept some of those drivers home. Still, the car count was very good with one hundred and forty one drivers signing in to race, the second highest car count ever at this track since Duval took over. B Mods were by far the highest class with forty three of them signing in to race and all three sanctioning bodies represented. It was a true hodge podge with cars from all over on hand including some area blacktop cars that converted over to run dirt, which is something highly out of the ordinary. Also noted was the fact that several former blacktop racers are switching over from the "darkside" to dirt racing which is partly a reflection on the unstable condition of some of the area tar tracks that used to be much stronger, and a seeming resurgence in a few of the area dirt tracks. Duval himself would take to the track on this night with his Modified, the first time he has raced at his own track since he purchased it.
The staff was a little overwhelmed by the huge turnout of racers, many of which arrived at the last minute due to work commitments, travel time and the questionable weather. This created a big back up and for that reason racing started nearly forty minutes late. However, once they got started, things moved along well with a plethora of races scheduled.
That is, until the ambulance crisis hit. This track is located in a rural area and is staffed by a volunteer local ambulance crew but when a major highway accident occurred, they were called away and there were no back ups available due to the serious nature of the highway incident and the fact that multiple ambulances were needed. I didn't keep time but I believe that we lost at least an hour before the ambulance was able to return and racing could again proceed.
We got back to racing which went swimmingly for awhile; that is until the fog started rolling in. It was an incredibly damp night anyway but then the fog started to form and boy, did it get heavy. This was just as the feature races started and quite frankly, they did some racing under what i felt were unsafe conditions as from the grandstands it was impossible to identify the cars on the front stretch and they totally disappeared on the back chute. In fact, the Super Stock feature was cut short because track officials couldn't see the cars and I don't know how the scorers could tell the cars apart, since manual scoring is still used here. Locals reported that they could never ever remember a fog event like what we saw on Friday.
So, we waited awhile longer and then, out of the blue, the fog started to lift and we were able to return to racing. However, the air was still extremely damp and it was starting to develop a layer of moisture on the top of the hard racing surface and suddenly, we had cars spinning wildly out of control, much like water being dropped on a tar track. Several wild wrecks were the result and finally, track officials took to rolling in the track before each event, to try and keep the moisture from forming. As you can imagine, all this took an inordinate amount of time and as the crowd slowly trickled out the gates, the races continued and the last checkered flag flew at about one thirty in the morning. Much of the delay was unavoidable however.
The premier race on the schedule was the Modified feature which went to Minnesota's Matt Gilbertson. Towing all the way from West central Minnesota, his sponsorship from Seubert Calf Ranches, a local firm, was likely the reason he drove such a long distance in shaky weather. He started in the third row and passed Michael Truscott for the lead and then held off a still challenge from Dave Baxter for the win. Since getting his new MB Customs car, Gilbertson has had a strong second half of the year.
Truscott came back to lead all the way and win the B Mod feature. Truscott has been one of the big winners in western Wisconsin this year with his GRT from CRC and he finished well ahead of Tony Bahr, who has been strong since debuting his new Shaw car on Labor Day weekend. Another big winner this year, Minnesota's Jason VandeKamp, finished a strong third.
Tommy Richards scored an easy win in the Super Stocks and Jay Kesan was smart in using the race track as he won the Street Stock feature. Eastern drivers Trent Nolan and Paul Diefenthaler clearly had more speed with their Stock Cars but Kesan and Danny Richards used their knowledge of the track to keep back the invaders and finish first and second.
Danny and Tommy's brother George won the Pure Stock feature as he is one of the top point getters in WISSOTA Pure Stocks so it was nearly a three brother sweep for the Richards family from Mondovi. By the way, for those that weren't aware, these Richards are all related to the racing Richards that do very well in eastern Wisconsin racing in Grand Nationals and now in Modifieds at tracks like Oshkosh, Beaver Dam and others.
George Seliger won the Hornet feature. What is notable about that is the fact that up until a couple of weeks ago, this car was a regular on the tar tracks of central Wisconsin and in fact, still sported a windshield on this night. No matter, it was a very fast car.
It was a long night for announcers Ben Brost and Steve Parsons as they had a lot of dead air to cover but they did a good job of entertaining the crowd during the "down time." I also thank them for their help with drivers' names for those unfamiliar to me.
One last thing from Friday night. Duval was very anxious for me to see his latest thinking and that is a new class of race car that he is developing. Recognizing that getting new drivers involved in the sport is increasingly hard and that the old starter class, the Pure Stocks, have gotten out of hand price wise as well as being hard to find, he is developing a new class to eventually replace them.
Called the NPS 6 class (New Pure Stocks), the class will be for six cylinder, front wheel drive cars such as intrepids, Concords, Malibus, Luminas etc. He said they are very obtainable and with a spec roll cage that he has been building, the whole car can be built for $1,500. To keep the class affordable, he will be instituting a $1,000 claim on the whole race car plus exchange. Everything goes except the seat and battery on the exchange.
He had his first built car on display and then it was raced with the Pure Stocks later. The Corsica was competitive with the Pure Stocks and his plan is to run them with the Pure Stocks until they have a full field of them built(hopefully some time next Summer) and that in the meantime he will pay both classes and score them separately, even though they race together. I do think that they will need to find some way to make them louder as the one raced on Friday night was way too quiet to be a race car!
The second half of Duval's special was rained out on Saturday night, just like most events also planned for this bad weather weekend.
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