Dirt Racing’s Winning Moment: Logan Seavey stole the headlines at the 4-Crown Nationals at Eldora Saturday night, sweeping feature wins in all three USAC national divisions (midget, sprint car and Silver Crown) to become the first driver since Kyle Larson in 2011 to accomplish the feat.
“This is probably one of the coolest nights of my life,” said Seavey to Flo Racing in victory lane. “I’m just driving three good racecars and I can do whatever I want, wherever I want with them. It’s just one of those nearly perfect nights.
Seavey, the current USAC midget points leader and this year’s Chili Bowl Nationals champion, entered the weekend at Eldora the only driver to have scored wins in all three USAC national divisions and proved literally untouchable Saturday night, with Chris Windom and Justin Grant only able to mount academic challenges against Seavey in the midget and sprint car features.
2023 4-CROWN NATIONALS RACE RESULTS
Dirt Racing’s Dramatic Moment: The single most dramatic of the features run at Eldora this weekend was the All-Star Circuit of Champions event, which saw Zeb Wise score the feature win, a victory that also sealed the $80,000 owners’ championship for the Rudeen Racing team despite a top-five finish from fellow title contender Tyler Courtney and the Clauson Marshall Racing team.
The victory snapped a two-year title streak for Courtney as a driver and CMR as a team.
What Dirt Racing Fans’ll Be Group Chatting About This Morning
Unpopular opinion I’m sure, but the midgets are really underwhelming when they run at Eldora. I know they’ve always been part of the 4-Crown Nationals, but besides the massive Eldora oval dwarfing the cars in terms of literal size, they race similar to the way crate late models seemed to at Bristol, just keep it matted with the wheel straight as possible. Some tracks are too small for big cars and some tracks are too big for, well, midgets.
It’s never fun watching dirt events that see two streaming partners carrying different parts of the program and I’m not naive enough to suggest that streaming partners need to share each other’s series. I will just say that I felt sincere empathy for dirt fans that had only DirtVision on Friday night. The amount of downtime that had to be filled between World of Outlaws segments during Friday’s program was agonizing.
Thomas Meseraull was completely composed by the time Flo Racing interviewed him after his midget feature wreck trying to avoid Jade Avedesian’s flip, but be honest … seeing his hand gestures immediately after the crash, how many people were expecting to see these two’s feud re-ignite?
Apparently the Colorado Buffaloes weren’t the only ones playing for clicks this weekend. Consider this missive from Walkapedia.
Anyone that knows dirt racing knows that Walkapedia has a reverence for the Chili Bowl unrivaled by even the backstretch rowdies of Tulsa, so maybe it’s not surprising to see him heap such effusive praise on a spectacular night for this year’s Chili Bowl champ. I’ll just say I hope this was misjudged sarcasm, because the Walkapedia account is usually objective and informative as open-wheel Twitter comes. This claim screamed clickbait.
While on that same vein of Colorado, seeing a display of actual sportsmanship between Courtney and Wise both before and after Saturday’s title-deciding ASCoC feature was a pleasure to watch.
Besides the two having a very sincere embrace after Wise bested Courtney for the title, both drivers reportedly wore each others’ t-shirts during pre-race activities at Eldora over the weekend. Coupled with the two racing each other and deciding the title clean on the track without contact or controversy, these two put the all-star in All-Star Circuit of Champions this weekend.
Dirt Racing’s Hero(es) of the Weekend
Seavey. One tweet says it all.
Dirt Racing’s Victim(s) of the Weekend
Rico Abreu did score the Outlaws feature win at Eldora Friday night, but his bid to sweep the winged sprint car portion of the 4-Crown Nationals came up four laps short Saturday night when his car jumped the lip in turn 4 and into the fence.
Turns 3 and 4 proved absolutely treacherous all night long for the sprint car drivers, as three went flipping during time trials alone. Of those drivers, Mitchel Moles endured the hardest crash of the night, fortunately walking away from the incident.
Moles may have had the hardest wreck, but the hardest night at Eldora undoubtedly went to Brady Bacon. Bacon also endured a nasty flip in turns 3 and 4 during sprint car qualifying Saturday night, but the night only got worse from there. Bacon ended up bowing out of the sprint car feature only five laps in with engine failure, then was unable to start the evening’s remaining feature due to a freak injury incurred in the pit area.
Bacon’s troubles in the sprint car feature saw his title chances all but evaporate, as closest competitor Grant finished second and now leads by 66 points with three races left in the 2023 campaign.
Up Next: Frontstretch will be back Wednesday morning (Sept. 27) with coverage of the High Limit Racing Series from Lernerville Speedway in Pennsylvania. Streaming coverage can be found on Flo Racing.
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