Dirt Racing’s Winning Moment: Kansas City’s Dillon Raffurty scored a bowl win of his own for the Midwest, grabbing the Sugar Bowl Nationals IMCA mod lite feature at Hendry County Motorsports Park Saturday night (Feb. 11) and capping a mini-series that saw Raffurty win all four nights of mod lite competition at the track.
Dirt Racing’s Dramatic Moment: The stock car feature of the Workin’ Man Nationals at the Dirt Track at Las Vegas was decided by only 44 thousandths of a second, with Dent, Minn.’s Ryan Satter edging Gresham, Ore.’s Kevin Roberts after the two waged a pitched battle up front for nearly the entirety of the feature event.
What Dirt Racing Fans’ll Be Group Chatting About This Morning
World Racing Group definitely took some flack Saturday night for deeming the week’s final DIRTcar Nationals event as beyond halfway, and thus complete, when the World of Outlaws program was rained out minutes after the Last Chance Showdown race was run. The program had already deviated twice from regularly scheduled action; first, that the sprint car races were all run without interruption from the modified support class and that the LCS was run before the pole dash.
This procedure is public information, so it shouldn’t have been an unknown for ticket holders. But I can understand the frustration of race fans in this situation. This isn’t NASCAR, where a rainout means that fans got to see at least two stages of racing with the full field on track. In this instance, a race ticket means that fans only got to see four heat races and the LCS, meaning they at no point actually saw a full field race.
Of course, judging from the crowds at Volusia this week, there doesn’t appear to be much need for a change in business practice from WRG. Still, if I’m them, this type of reaction may be worth considering a straight rainout in the future.
One other note from the weekend, that incomplete WoO feature will be made up when the series returns to Volusia in March.
Time for me to talk out of both sides of my mouth. Volusia’s rained out feature got rescheduled. One that did note was at East Bay Raceway Park, where the Saturday finale of the Winternationals was rained out early in the day and will not be rescheduled.
In this case, the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series did the opposite of what WRG did, frowning on the weather forecast and pulling the plug. That didn’t stop some fans from asking a seemingly obvious question, why not race on Sunday?
I’m well aware it’s not just a simple as backing the schedule up a day. That means getting all the track crew back to the facility for another day, getting a potentially waterlogged race surface prepared, and perhaps most importantly getting the grandstand packed again on a day that race fans had not planned to attend (and it was Super Bowl Sunday as well, which likely would have kept at least some fans at home). But given how East Bay is on a very finite timeline before it’s gone for good, the fan in me wishes the track would have taken the risk and run the Winternationals to their scheduled conclusion.
It wasn’t perfect or used in all instances, but RaceXR’s coverage of the Workin’ Man Nationals showed improvement in that there were some instances during the replay made available for viewing where instant replays of events on track where actually shown (the absence of said replays was discussed in this column several weeks ago during XR’s coverage of the Cabin Fever at Boyd’s Speedway). Small progress, but progress nonetheless.
One other note on XR’s program out in Las Vegas, the racing itself was entertaining. Three features were decided by a car length or less Saturday night. It’s a real shame the Vegas track is such a freaking haul for most of the big-league dirt racing teams in the country, because the surface out there is worthy of some big events.
The USAC National Sprint Car tour tackles Volusia on Monday for the first time ever, and one of the big names contesting the series title had quite the omen this weekend at the track. Hard to tell if it was a good or bad one though.
Dirt Racing’s Heroes of the Weekend
I watched Saturday’s program from Las Vegas on replay, so I didn’t have access to see the full tape of the program, but this weekend’s shout out goes to every car in the pits out West that assisted with track packing. The XR folks followed through with an act of good will towards teams that helped out that’s also worth calling attention to.
Dirt Racing’s Victim of the Weekend
There was no replay that I was able to find of this incident, but Leander, Texas’s Ryan Stoy appeared to flip his dwarf car down the Las Vegas frontstretch in the closing laps of the Workin’ Man Nationals feature Saturday night.
Numbers Game
7
Dirt tracks that ran oval track racing programs this weekend in the U.S.
118
Nation’s largest car count this weekend, Saturday at Central Arizona Raceway.
$7,500
The nation’s largest purse awarded this weekend, to the winner of the Sugar Bowl IMCA mod lite feature at Hendry County Motorsports Park Saturday night.
Up Next: Frontstretch will be back Tuesday morning (Feb. 14) with continued coverage of the DIRTcar Nationals from Volusia Speedway Park, as well as the opening night for the All-Star Circuit of Champions at East Bay Raceway Park. Streaming coverage can be found on DirtVision and Flo Racing, respectively.
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