Just as promised for over a week, the rains rolled into the Charlotte area by Noon on Friday. Light and more scattered at first, by mid afternoon most everyone was getting wet although the most heavy storms with some severe weather steered away from the Charlotte metro area. However, the officials at the Dirt Track were determined to get a show in, or at least as much of a show in as they could, knowing that they likely couldn't complete two full programs on Saturday before the Midnight curfew and then they would have a real issue on their hands.
Also as promised, the rains stopped by 5 pm and by the time I headed out to the track, they were hard at work trying to whip the red clay back into shape for racing action. None of the race teams were too excited about the prospect though and only a handful of teams had even unloaded their cars by the time I arrived. Most were taking a "wait and see" attitude as quite frankly, the track was a mess and I had serious doubts that they would be able to get the track into some kind of racing shape. However, by the time I checked out the track once again later, they had made some amazing progress and it did seem like racing would take place.
The Sprint Cars were called to the track for engine warm ups and then they were given hot laps, ostensibly to help widen out the racing groove but of course, they were all in racing mode and none of their six hot lap sessions(by heat), did much good overall to change the character of the track. But since the Sprint Cars are soooo slooow to get even their warm ups going, the hot lap sessions took nearly an hour and it was a quarter to nine before the Big Blocks hit the track for their Last Chance qualifiers.
The track was blinding fast but the groove was narrow and passing all night proved to be a real challenge. Of course, this was to be expected due to the weather issues they had been handed and the lower groove, narrow as it was, was smooth. A huge berm developed and woe to the driver that jumped that as much of the evening's passing was done not by driving by other cars, but hoping the driver in front of you got out of line. Again, this was to be expected on a night like this and not an indictment of the track or those who prepared it.
Lots of smashed up equipment was the result as the Late Model heats particularly saw a great deal of break downs and wrecks with a large number of torn up cars as everyone was running very hard and giving no quarter. Some of the biggest losers were Chris Ferguson, Dakotah Knuckles and Rick Eckert who all lost good qualifying spots when issues slowed them down in their respective heats.
Trying to get as much down as possible, there were no breaks taken for track prep, an item that had been built into the pre race schedule to be done at least a couple of times. Because of that, the track was never widened out and all the racing was done in the lowest lane and a half of the track, which hampered the kind of racing we were all hoping to see.
With the surface the way it was, I was expecting to see a bunch of Sprint Car flips as they banged up and over the huge berm but that proved to be incorrect. In fact, the only tip over of the night was a relatively mild one by Paul Nieheiser in the B Feature.
However, "Father Time" kept ticking away as the long litany of qualifying events ground by, and by the time the Sprint B feature was done, it was approaching the Midnight hour which apparently is the curfew time for the Dirt Track. The announcers warned that there might be a forced break in the action a couple of races before the end and people immediately started streaming for the parking lot. When the Big Blocks, lined up in staging for the main, all started turning around and heading back to their trailers, it was apparent that we were going to see all that we would on Friday.
So, the plan for Saturday is to run off Friday night's three features in the early afternoon, and then quickly turn things around and start the Saturday show in the late afternoon, trying to maintain Saturday's plan as much as possible. I'm sure we're going to see a much different type of track for the Saturday show and perhaps one that will allow much more passing and hopefully, finally start to crown some feature race winners.
One thing I did see on Friday that I've never witnessed before was the way they cleaned off the outside concrete wall here. Many times I've seen track workers come out with shovels and scrape the mud off the wall so the drivers had better visibility of where the wall was, but I had never seen it done with a motor vehicle before. They had a four wheel drive truck with some sort of scraper mounted on the front and he just drove at a severe angle to the track and scrapped off the mud from the wall as he drove. It worked super slick and was much faster and less labor intensive than the "tried and true" method.
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