ALGER — All the ingredients were present for a great night of sprint-car racing. Beautiful weather, great race track, solid fields of fast 410 and Sportsman sprints.
Add in the bonus treat of getting to see some modifieds race for the first time and a large field of Outlaw Hornets and it was a can’t-miss proposition.
And it didn’t miss.
It’s been a couple years since I’ve been able to make the trek north to Skagit Speedway, but it didn’t take long for me to remember how much I liked the track the last time I was there.
The infield was deceptively quiet when I got there, just as the drivers’ meeting was wrapping up. That period of calm didn’t last long, as the cars were soon firing up and taking to the dirt to help get the track ready for the night’s racing.
Quick impressions of Skagit’s infield:
— Smells: Fried food, baby oil (used to keep mud from sticking to the cars), fuel, oil, dirt.
— Sights: Teams (families, friends, etc.) crawling over cars; people standing on platforms along the track and in the center of the infield to watch the cars going around; lots of black — black t-shirts, hats &shorts, black sunglasses.
— Sounds: motors firing, cars hot-lapping, P.A. announcer giving directions for lineups, conversations got progressively tougher as words were drowned out by more and more motors coming on-line, laughter in one pit and anger in another.
After moving over to the grandstands, I witnessed a neat way to keep the crowd involved, updated and entertained at the same time. The 410 driver who set fast time in qualifying, points leader Jesse Whitney of Stanwood at 11.413 seconds, came out to the frontstretch to roll a giant, 1970s-game-show-style die for the invert.
Later on Whitney and the rest of the drivers came into grandstands to help raise money for the Relay for Life cancer charity by passing their helmets through the crowd. Two-time defending 410 champion Barry Martinez of Lynnwood returned with an impressive haul of green — and some silver, too — as the drivers raised nearly $1,800.
The $2,000 mark was met after an impromptu auctioning of a Kasey Kahne jacket and some final donations by track owner Steve Beitler and the coffee-stand workers. After the races Beitler and many others made their way to Burlington-Edison High School to participate in the Relay for Life walk-a-thon, the second straight year Skagit Speedway has participated in the fundraiser.
Many thanks to the Beitlers, Kaleb Hart, Seth Sands, the drivers and teams, and everyone else at Skagit Speedway for helping me on Saturday. I can’t wait for Dirt Cup next weekend.
Your mileage may vary: NASCAR can’t be too happy to have two straight races decided by — yawn! — fuel mileage. Yes, I thought the end of Sunday’s Cup race at Michigan was tense, but it reminded me a lot of how my father-in-law watches the NBA on TV.
He generally ignores the game until the final minute. If it’s a blow-out, the TV is shut off or the channel changed. If the score is close, he’ll watch the final minute of play, which often takes 15-20 minutes or more of real time.
If it wasn’t for RaceBuddy (see below), I would have been tempted to do a light-leak test of my eyelids for all but the final 30 laps.
Are you my Buddy? I tried out the free RaceBuddy computer application on NASCAR.com during Sunday’s Cup race. I tried it once last year and once again really enjoyed the in-car shots and audio. My only problem was that early in the race I had video from Tony Stewart’s car but audio from Greg Biffle.
While I really enjoyed hearing Biffle, his crew chief and spotter going back-and-forth, not being able to see what the driver was seeing took a lot away from it. And later in the race I had Biffle’s video feed but Joey Logano’s audio. Since Logano was nowhere near the front, I just turned the RaceBuddy volume down at that point and watched the race on TV, just occasionally peaking at my computer screen.
Maybe I wasn’t doing something right, but it sure would have spiced up the boring first three-quarters of the race to have had the audio and video synched up.
Said what? The end of the Cup race was tense, as I said, waiting to see who would run out of gas. I am a bit surprised at Biffle’s post-race comments, as he seemed to be complaining about Jimmie Johnson racing him too hard near the end, resulting in both running out of gas before the checkered flag.
What was Johnson supposed to do? Ride around in 2nd and hope Biffle would run out? I could be wrong (like that’s never happened), but it sounded like Johnson had been told he was good on gas, or maybe he just decided to gamble and go for the win — the way a three-time defending champion should — instead of points-racing. Either way, it injected some drama into what could have been a real snoozer of an ending.
It’s not raining here: Nice to see Ephrata Raceway Park (see Sunday’s blog post) was as welcoming this Saturday to the rained-out racers from the Wenatchee Valley Super Oval as WVSO was to the rained-out Outlaw Compact racers from South Sound last weekend.
It is definitely a win-win-win for the tracks, racers and fans when promoters show flexibility and willingness to make changes on the fly to their shows.
Hard times: The report that General Motors will be pulling back from all levels of racing is just the latest in a series of bleak news for racing, nationally and locally. There were already reports of a shortage of GM crate motors — used by many late-model racers around the country and required at some tracks like Evergreen Speedway — before the announcement.
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