Tuesday night, February 2nd, the Lucas Oil portion of the 2021 Speed Weeks wrapped up at Bubba Raceway Park on the outskirts of Ocala Florida. And the ninth successfully completed event of Speed Weeks saw the eighth different winner sitting in victory lane at the conclusion of the forty lapper as Shane Clanton drove a strong race to dominate the last half of the main to take the win. It is quite remarkable to see that many different winners so early in the season but just illustrates both the strength and depth of the fields that have been racing together for about the last two weeks.
Car counts have remained strong and the races themselves have all be hard fought contests. Tonight forty six drivers signed in to race which resulted in the normal program of qualifying, four heats and two B Features leading up the finale. Both Chris Nash and Doug Drown remained on the grounds while opting not to compete while Spencer Hughes pulled up and left to go Modified racing and his pit spot was quickly gobbled up by Bobby Pierce so they could move out of the mud. Jaden Frame drove the back up car of Joe Denby rather than his own machine tonight and while Ray Cook didn't have much success with the car at East Bay, Frame both qualifies well and then raced well also and made the main event while Denby has yet to start a main.
Time trials were torrid once again as Jimmy Owens set fast time but was only one thousand of a second quicker than Pierce. I guess the closeness of the qualifying illustrates just how hard it has been to become a repeat winner in this southern swing.
Twenty eight cars started the main event on Tuesday with Owens leading the first handful of laps until he was overtaken by Pierce who then enjoyed a lengthy time as the leader. The track, which was good but not as spectacularly good as it had been on Monday night, had been "farmed" before the feature and it took some laps for it to clean off. When it did, Pierce would build up some momentum and then drove past Owens. But the driver on the move was Clanton who had started outside row one, fallen back some and then climbed back into contention. He used the second of only two restarts during the feature to move up to the high side of Pierce and when the green flew, the battle was on. They raced side by side for a couple of laps with Clanton gradually establishing his authority and then finally breaking into the lead down the back chute. Once in front, with no yellow flags to slow him down and no lapped traffic to contend with, it was a relatively easy drive after that as he maintained a comfortable lead over Pierce and drive on for the win.
Tanner English had a nice run for third with Tim McCreadie and a frustrated Owens completing the top five. Jimmy hammered the guard rail on the back chute at one point and this led to him blowing a tire as he crossed the finish line but at least he did get the finish, even though it wasn't what he was hoping for, given that he started on the pole and then led laps.
Twenty four of the starters were around at the finish with all on the lead lap and while the first half of the race had much side by side racing and passing, at just shortly after the halfway point the outside wore out and everyone matriculated to the bottom of the track where passing was then tough. There was however, not much crashing etc. so the teams will be doing more fine tuning than major repair work for their next race.
Some of the teams will now head home, having had enough racing to last them for awhile. Others were on their way to Volusia Speedway Park to catch some other classes racing, do a little relaxing and fine tuning on their cars while still others will head up to North Florida Speedway for the Iron Man Late Model Series and the Florida Frostbuster for eight and ten grand to win races next weekend. In any event, the teams were quickly dispersing in various directions as soon as the last checkered flag waved.
It was not quite as cold as it had been on Monday but it was still very much on the miserable side and Lucas Oil officials kept their nose to the grindstone, even though it was the last race of the series and they pushed through another program in impressive fashion. The whole show, from first green to the final checkered took just two hours and the quick program was widely appreciated and lauded by the fans in attendance.
Yesterday there was much noise going on all day besides the race cars as the track is right next to the local cattle auction house and there was an auction in progress with lots of disgruntled cattle bellowing as they were apparently not getting paid the price they thought they were worth. However, they had moved on by Tuesday and the only sounds were the mellow roars of the nine hundred horsepower dirt throwing machines and the howl of the constant winds. I thank Lucas and Bubba for putting on this event under far less than satisfactory conditions. I have no idea what kind of financial arrangements were made between Bubba and Lucas but with the weather, the crowd was again small on Tuesday and this was not the week for anyone to be making a fortune but the races did go on as scheduled.
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