The United States Modified Touring Series (USMTS) began a widely anticipated season on March 5th at the RPM Speedway in Texas near Crandall on Friday night.
The USMTS has gone to a new business plan for the 2021 racing season as they have cut considerably the number of shows that they will be running this year but have increased their purses for the shows that they run by a large measure as well as increasing their year end point fund. Their thought was to cut down the number of shows, thus reducing travel expenses for the racers while at the same time making each show a much more profitable venture. All their races this year will pay five and ten thousand dollars to win and when you start to talk purses that rival what the best Late Model traveling series put on the line, you quickly gain the attention of the Modified stars, many of whom have nearly as much invested in their Modified programs as do the Late Models.
There has been much talk all Winter about the new plan of the USMTS and many people excited to see what the 2021 racing season would bring for them.
However, Mother Nature had much to say about the start of this season and this event nearly never happened. It was originally scheduled to take place one weekend earlier with the RPM Speedway hosting one night and Big O Speedway to host the other. Of course, one hundred year ice and snow storms saw the first attempt postponed by one week. The second attempt would see RPM scheduled for one night and Super Bowl Speedway to host the second night. However, remaining moisture from the recent snows made Super Bowl unusable so RPM took on the monstrous and financially challenging task of hosting both nights. With two shows each paying ten grand to win and with only a couple days of announcing that they would be running both shows, it was a bold move by RPM to do both nights. And that doesn't even take in to account the amount of work necessary to prepare their race track and grounds and make it manageable for racing to happen.
The amount of time and work the folks at RPM put in to make this show happen was gigantic and they relied on helpful sources within their community to help them out with man power, heavy equipment and other help. They even had to cancel practice on Thursday so they would have more time to get the track and grounds ready. On race day they were still working frantically on the pit area especially and had to hold race cars out of the pits until early afternoon when they finally could get the first adventurers into the pits. They did get a couple of rigs stuck but nothing serious and the racers worked well together to make it happen. The staff and all the volunteers that helped them out deserve a huge thanks as well as the owners of the track who took on a considerable risk to even host this show. Fortunately, they were rewarded with the largest Friday night crowd that I have seen at this track.
Everyone was interested to see just what USMTS's new program would draw in terms of race cars with lots of rumors about just who might follow the series this year. There were several new drivers who announced that they would be following the entire series and it would be interesting to see just who showed up. As it turned out, they had a very fine field of seventy one Modifieds on hand and while there were a few different drivers who raced, the vast majority of those on hand would be expected to be on hand anyway. The largest difference may be in how many drivers follow the series to all their races which would help bolster the car counts at some of those tracks where fields have been sketchy in the past. Some of those far flung tracks however, are no longer on the schedule due to the higher purses required to be paid and some places just not able to do that.
The format for the USMTS has changed for 2021 also. No longer will they be drawing numbers and racing for passing points through the heats as they used to. Now they will be qualifying just like all the other traveling series. However, at least they won't be starting the heats straight up off qualifying but will instead invert the first four cars in each heat and then run passing points. I registered my disapproval with the change to USMTS head Todd Staley (duly noted), but he said they went to the change because he thought it would be the fairest way of doing the program but he did admit that some of the "big names" frankly didn't want to show up if they thought they might have to start in the back of a heat if they drew poorly. This is the same kind of pressure that has been placed on the Late Model sanctioning bodies over the years that has seen all those series go to qualifying. They never bother to poll the paying customers when they do this though. Four of the six Modified heats were won right off the front row, much like we saw in Florida. However, this is a new year and we will see how this all plays out. Tyler Wolff would turn out to be quick qualifier at 16.282 seconds.
Six big heats and three B Features would set the field for the feature race with fifty laps being the race distance for the main. Twenty six cars would start the main with the last two in the show being provisional starters from 2020 in Zach VanderBeek and Tanner Mullins.
Veteran Terry Phillips would be the class of the field quickly grabbing the lead from Fito Gallardo and then leading the rest of the distance. The race was slowed five times in the first half of the contest but the final twenty nine laps of the event would go off nonstop.
Phillips would build up a big lead while Gallardo, Tyler Davis and Joe Duvall would battle for second. On the move was Dereck Ramirez and Carlos Ahumada Jr as they came from the fourth and fifth rows respectively to move into contention. As the race wore on, Phillips started to get into lapped traffic and his lead was gradually shortened up. At first it looked like Ramirez would be the main challenger but then he seemed to lose his edge and Ahumada Jr became the big player.
He sliced past both Ramirez and Davis to take over second and began to close on Phillips. However, Phillips, who may have been taking it careful in traffic, had built up too much of a lead and he crossed the finish line a corner ahead of Ahumada Jr, Davis, Ramirez and Jake O'Neal. Nineteen of the starters will still on the track at the finish and only three had been lapped.
Defending USRA national champion Lucas Schott finished in the top ten but he was not driving his usual car on this weekend. His car had been sold and his new car was not yet completed so he drove one of Dustin Sorensen's cars as the fellow Minnesota racer has a pair of MB Customs, one of which he loaned out. Both Gallardo's showed much speed but neither finished and Fito hammered the third turn wall after battling for second early in the contest.
It was a long night of racing as along with the Modifieds, Limited Modifieds, Eco Modifieds, Factory Stocks, Tuners and Dwarf cars also raced and with it being the first race of the year, there were lots of cars in all classes too. One hundred and eighty one cars signed in to race plus the Dwarfs so there were many races and B Features indeed. Winners included Larry Osborne of Bonham Tx in the Eco Mods, Reece Solander from Iola Ks in the Limited Mods, Walter Hamilton from Dallas in the Factory Stocks and Bondy Cannon from Mineral Wells in the Tuners plus the Dwarf winner which I missed. It was a very long night of racing with the final checkered waving well after Midnight. However, it was not a fault of poor management or execution but largely because there were just so many races to be run. Saturday night the little cars race elsewhere so there will be one less division in action.
It should be noted that with all the extreme weather of the past couple of weeks, a rough race track was certainly a possibility but the track crew must have done a wonderful job as the track was not at all rough for most of the show with the last couple of support features bouncing a little but nothing of an extreme nature, which certainly could have been the case.
As I move into my seventh decade of chasing races, I managed to do something different for the first time this weekend. For the first time ever I rode with a racing team to as event and stayed for a couple of nights in the toter with the crew. It has been different and enlightening and gave me a chance to see what some of the teams expenses are that I perhaps would not have even considered for a "road trip." I type this in the toter with the drone of the generators filling the air here on pit road while the rest of the crew works on making their car faster for night two and I manage to keep my hands clean!
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