Saturday, July 20, 2019

Zeigler Earns Pole For Silver Dollar

Friday night, July 19th was night number two of the ninth annual Silver Dollar Nationals at the Kosiski family's I-80 Speedway near Greenwood Nebraska. It was another "cooker" of a day with temperatures even higher than on Thursday with the reported heat index at 117 degrees but a strong wind was at least blowing the hot air around some. It the shade, it was miserable. In the direct sunshine, it was "out of this world hot" and even the locals, who have days like this most Summers are also complaining. But, racing will go on so we all deal with the heat in our own way. Toughest of all are the race mechanics, working on the race cars and laying in the dirt to fix them, seemingly unmindful of the oppressive heat as they go about their jobs. They have a dedication and single mindedness of purpose that is quite remarkable and while the drivers collect the glory, the mechanics remain pretty much the forgotten people behind the scenes but the ones that keep the cars running while the drivers collect the glory.

The Lucas Oil Late Models will participate in two rounds of heat races on Friday night, randomly drawn against different drivers in each round with collected points in the two heats determining the starting lineups for Saturday night's main event. The Lucas drivers fought against this format tooth and nail but the Kosiski's remained firm in their ideas on how to run this race, and now the moaning has pretty much subsided as the drivers recognize that this is the way it is going to be. Meanwhile, the show that is put on is "over the top" exciting and probably unmatched by any racing going on. They can time trial and run heats straight up from now until the end of time and not match the excitement level from one set of heat races under this format.

Forty nine Late Models signed in to race on Friday night. Three drivers, all from the local area, did not return after Thursday night action while seven of the Malvern Bank drivers switched over and joined the field. Later, quite impressively, two of these drivers, Billy Leighton Jr and Corey Zeitner, would both be among the top eighteen that would lock into Saturday night's show as the local Late Models showed that they are not to be sneezed at.

Once again, Steve Kosiski and his crew have done a marvelous job of preparing the race track for Friday night's action. Despite the oppressive heat, constant sun and near gale force winds, they have managed to produce a race track which is fast, smooth and with a wide groove as drivers have been using the whole track, right from the rub rail to bouncing off the outside wall on many occasions with virtually no dust to be had either.  Their secret seems to be to just soak the heck out of the track, then let it sit and trickle down to the subsoil, and then just continue to keep soaking the heck out of it. Truth be told, most race tracks don't put the amount of water on their tracks that they should, or don't start doing it as soon as they should; all because of the fear that the track might have a little "character" to it and Lord knows, we wouldn't want a race track with a bump in it these days, with the race cars of 2019 just as feeble as their asphalt counter parts. Rankly, off the top of my head, I can't think of another track in the Midwest that could produce such a fine track for racing given the conditions that they are working with.

The ten heat races for the Lucal Oil Late Models ranged from good, to very good, to spectacular, depending on the heats. There were no real "lemons" in any of them, as even if the leader was alone, there always seemed to be at least one great battle for position going on somewhere in the pack and with each position so important(the beauty of this format), everyone was fighting for each and every position. Slide jobs were to be found everywhere in each and every race and some of them were truly spectacular with the crowd "oohing and aahing" like they were watching fourth of July fireworks as one big slider after another was thrown. While it is hard to single out anyone as being most spectacular, props must go to Bobby Pierce, Devin Moran and Tyler Erb for their boldness, or perhaps their youthful enthusiasm that allows them to attempt some moves that seem to defy gravity itself. In any event, it made for some very entertaining racing. It's hard to believe that with the huge crowd on hand, despite the weather, and with the entertainment value of this show, that more tracks don't wise up, junk time trials and go to some type of format similar to this where drivers truly race their way into the show.

Mason Zeigler put together two solid runs to earn the pole and Tim McCreadie will start outside of him on Saturday night. It was interesting that some drivers that didn't show well at all on Thursday night came back strong on Friday night to make the big show such as Jimmy Owens,  Chris Madden and Earl Pearson Jr while Jonathan Davenport had one bad heat on Friday that set him all the way back to row six for Saturday.

Along with the Late Models, the support division for Friday night was the USMTS Modifieds who were qualifying for their eight grand to win feature race on Saturday night. Perhaps the only disappointing part of the show on Friday was the relatively low car count for the USMTS cars. While they had eight of their top ten in current point standings and fourteen of their top twenty on hand to race, there was little else to go with them. They are out of their "region of comfort" as far as having locals to race with them, even though this is an excellent paying weekend and for a series that has struggled with their car counts on more than one occasion already this year, only twenty six in total were on hand. This translated into three heats which they then repeated, using the same format as the Late Models.

They also did run a qualifying feature race on Friday, produced with a "gimmicky" format that didn't seem too productive. They ran off fifteen laps, paid the winner a grand, and then inverted the top six as they were running at that point. They then ran another fifteen laps and threw the checkered with the winner getting a grand for that part of the total feature race. It seemed contrived to me and didn't help the race to any large degree. Terry Phillips, who won the first part and the first grand, admitted afterward that he didn't push too hard for the second half of the race once he got into the top eight as the top eight at the end of the race will redraw for Saturday's big feature anyway, so what was the point of killing himself to gain a spot or two? I just have to believe that the USMTS can do better than this.

With the extreme weather conditions, the security guards at the ticket gate qualified for the "Grinch of the Weekend" award. While they changed their policy for Friday night so that spectators could bring in empty containers(insulated cups etc) as long as they were empty or filled with just ice, if they had water in them, the water had to be consumed before the spectators could walk into the  grandstand! Not every smart thinking on their part or very welcoming.



No comments:

Post a Comment