With the rain shortened program on Thursday at the Ogilvie Raceway, the Mod Wars USMTS vs. WISSOTA Modified battle would run a double header program on Friday night, July 14th.
The USMTS cars would battle in a thirty five lap feature race left over from Thursday and then run another full program. Along with the Mods, there would be four other WISSOTA classes also racing and they too had left over feature races to run from Thursday along with another full program in each class as a part of the Friday night show.
If you're thinking that this sounds like a lot of racing and a long night could be in the cards, you would be perfectly correct. As I type this, I am shot. Racing started on 5 pm straight up on Friday and the final checkered flag waved at 1:35 am this morning. I suppose for veterans of Super Nationals, this just sounds like another night of their long week but I was never very good at marathon race watching By the end of this night, I couldn't even remember who won the first feature that I had seen about eight hours earlier without notes to refer to. I guess this is one reason that I have never considered Super Nationals. It just sounds like too much of a good thing to me.
The real heroes of this night however, were the track prep people as well as the other employees of Ogilvie Raceway that managed to keep things going and the whole show operating smoothly. The conditions were about as bad as they could be for racing, with the temperature approaching ninety degrees, a hazy and smoky sky and a fairly strong wind. How do you keep moisture in the race track and keep it from rubbering up and/or turning into a dust bowl?
But they did a great job. At one point during the makeup Modified feature the track did start to take rubber but they quickly took care of that soon after. Yes, we did have to sit through one farming session that lasted nearly an hour and also occasional quick shots from the water truck but even to the end of the night, while the track was super slick and black from top to bottom, there was no dust, no more appearance of a rubbered up surface and they had drivers running all over the track. That's about as good as you could home for at any track, at any time.
The highlight class was the USMTS Mods and in the makeup feature, it was Jake Timm who would take the lead from Eric Lamm on lap three and lead the rest of the race for the win. A late yellow would set up a sprint finish but Timm would hold off Dereck Ramirez and Tanner Mullens for the win.
And it would almost turn out to be a double dip win for Timm, if not for a late charge by Jim Chisholm that would see him win his first USMTS feature of the season. The Modifieds would run forty laps of nonstop racing in the second event and with twenty nine cars starting, you can guess that slower traffic would be a concern.
Timm hit on a group of a couple cars near the end of the race that were too quick for him to get past. He would try but just couldn't make the pass. Meanwhile, Chisholm had passed Dave Cain and Shane Sabraski to move into second and was closing on Timm at a rapid pace. Timm had to decide whether to stay in the low groove and hope that Chisholm wouldn't go around him or move up the track to try and pass the slower cars.
Jake opted to move to the cushion but he couldn't make the pass there either and Chisholm was able to drive under him with just five laps to go and would then go on for the win, robbing Timm of the double. Sabraski and Cain would finish third and fourth with their spec engined cars.
Joe Wilbur was a double winner in the Hornets, taking both feature races offered. Keith Tourville would do the same in the Street Stock class. Mod Four winners would be Tyler Larson and Tommy Bawden. The Midwest Mods had a field of fifty drivers plus with Zach Benson and Sabraski doing the winning in those two races. Sabraski was taking his first ride of the year in the MidMods, driving for the owner of Granite City Motor Park. For Sabraski, it was his eight hundred and fiftieth feature win of his career, a remarkable statistic given his age. and the possible time he has left to race. He is in his prime right now and shows no signs of fading as he routinely runs three or four nights a week in a pair of WISSOTA classes.
Here are the eye opening statistics of the program. The first race started promptly at 5 pm and the final checkered waved at 1:35 am. The afternoon portion of the program consisted of eleven events with one hundred and sixty five laps of racing.
The second show would start at 9 pm and would consist of twenty five more races and two hundred and eighty two laps of racing. For the day, there would be thirty six races and four hundred and forty seven laps of racing.
Interestingly, two drivers in the Hornet class would race at other tracks in the area, both getting top five finishes in their feature races. After that, they would load up and travel to Ogilvie, with both arriving in time to run the Hornet feature here and also get top five finishes!
And they're not done either. All five classes have one more show at Ogilvie on Saturday with the biggest money on the line as the Mods will race for eleven grand and with some generous donations, the MidMods will race for five grand. Hopefully, at some point, the guy driving the water truck can get just a short nap in before he's back making laps.
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