“The One Night Stand for Fifteen Grand” came right down to the wire Tuesday night as Jesse Hockett edged out Dave Darland to win a thriller at the Southern Iowa Speedway in Oskaloosa. The Ultimate Challenge featuring the non-wing or “traditional” USAC sprint cars played out in front of a huge crowd that were sent back home, or to their motels, or to their campers buzzing about the action that they had just witnessed.
Hockett and Darland earned front row starting positions for the thirty-lap main event through a unique qualifying method where drivers accumulated points through two sets of heat races (more on that later). On the first attempt at a start, Darland got a bit of a jump and it was called back, while on the second attempt to take the green it was Hockett who got on the gas too early. Given one last chance to get it right, or else, the two brought the field off turn four in perfect fashion and twenty-four cars thundered into turn one. Darland headed down the backstretch as the leader with Hockett giving chase and as the battles for position heated up behind them, the two leaders left everybody else a straightaway behind.
Hockett was already cutting into Darland’s lead nearing the mid-race point and when “The People’s Champ” closed in on lapped traffic Hockett made his move to take the lead on lap sixteen. On the next lap the red flag flew as Travis Rilat jumped the cushion in turn one, tagged the guardrail and then went through a series of bone-jarring flips before finally coming to a halt. The fan sitting next to me said that he counted twelve times that Rilat’s car went over and it was good to see him crawl out of the mangled mess uninjured.
On the restart the scene up front looked similar to what we saw earlier, just with the roles reversed as Hockett pulled out to about a ten car-length advantage over Darland and, as those two set themselves apart from the rest, there was plenty of action to watch back in the pack. Before the red it looked like Brady Bacon was a car to watch as he had climbed from fifteenth to sixth, but he faded on the restart as Kevin Swindell and Josh Wise were now making runs to the front. With the laps winding down our attention was pulled back to the front of the pack as Darland was slowly making up ground on Hockett and with a lapped car or two just ahead it looked as though we just might have a thrilling finish on our hands and believe me, they did not disappoint.
Taking the white flag Darland dove to the inside of turn one, but could not make it stick as he slid up the track and even appeared to give up some ground on Hockett. Going into turn three the lapped car of Henry Clarke loomed ahead running the high groove so Hockett had to decide whether to stay up on the cushion, the favored line through three and four throughout the race, or go low and risk having Darland drive around him on the outside. Hockett stuck with the cushion and when Darland went to the bottom he somehow kept it there without drifting up the banking and the crowd came to their feet as the two exited the final turn side-by-side with Clarke thrown into the mix for extra excitement.
Clarke left just enough room for Hockett to squeeze his VKCC Motorsports #13 between the lapped car and the guardrail while Darland tried to find every bit of moisture that he could running the low line down the frontstretch and it was literally a drag race to the checkers. Only the people sitting even with the flagstand knew right away who won while the rest of us looked to the scoreboard to see whose transponder tripped the loop first and when the number at the top did not change we knew that Hockett had prevailed by a matter of inches. Chad Boat came across the line in the third spot, Levi Jones would finish fourth with Cole Whitt coming home fifth. Kevin Swindell started thirteenth and finished sixth, Jerry Coons Jr. started next to Swindell in row seven and finished seventh while Josh Wise overcame problems early in the night to race his way from twenty-second to eighth.
If you read my report on the 360 Nationals at Knoxville you’ll know that I mentioned that the only bright spot for Hockett last week was his Thursday night stint with Bill W. on Hoseheads Radio. Obviously the tide has turned now for the Warsaw, Missouri, driver and it will be interesting to see if he can carry this momentum over to the winged 410 Nationals at Knoxville beginning tonight (Wednesday).
USAC UC Notes…..First of all kudos to Terry McCarl and his entire crew for all of their efforts in presenting the two Challenge events at Oskaloosa. They were dealt an unexpected blow on Monday night with the rain that eventually caused a heavy one-grooved track at feature time, but they recovered very nicely. Add in the fact that he does all of this work while sweeping the 360 Nationals the week before and while prepping for the biggest event of the year for him as a racer and it is quite amazing. I’m sure that T-Mac will be the first to give credit to all of the great sponsors, track workers, family, friends and volunteers who help out with these shows, but it does take one dynamic personality to pull it all together and Terry McCarl is just that…..Rather than running time trials, the forty-two drivers drew for their starting spots in the first set of four heats. Then, using the passing points from that first set of heats, the top twenty-four were inverted (six per heat) for the second round of four heat races. The top twenty in points following both sets of heats were then lined straight up for the A-Main while the remainder of the field ran a B-Main with the top four finishers advancing to the feature. I must say that I loved this method of qualifying as it gave the fans more racing for their money and I feel that it helped make the track wide and racy with multiple grooves rather than the one-lane tracks that often develop after a full field uses the same line for two laps of time trials. I would love to see Knoxville try this qualifying method during a weekly show some Saturday night in 2010 to see how it would work with the winged cars……Five drivers, plus Travis Rilat, got upside down during the night and thankfully all of them escaped serious injury. Coleman Gulick exploded a right rear tire entering turn one during hot laps and flipped once after hitting the guardrail. Josh Wise had nowhere to go when a car spun in front of him in turn four during the fourth heat race and he went over a couple of times. Wise returned for the second round of heats and earned enough points to start mid-pack in the B-Main where he finished second to Matt Westphal. As noted above, Wise was then the hard charger advancing the most positions in the feature race. Aussie driver Dene McAllen took a spill in turn one of the fifth heat while the scariest looking skirmish of the night came at the start of the seventh heat. Brad Sweet tried to make it three-wide splitting the middle of Dave Darland and Brady Bacon heading into turn one and when he hopped the left front of Bacon his Kasey Kahne Motorsports car #9 went into a wild catapult that launched the fuel cell of his car at least fifty feet into the air. Sweet’s car along with the car of Sheldon Leesekamp actually came to a halt before the fuel cell finally landed with a thud ahead of them on the racetrack…..Terry Babb was leading the second heat when his motor let go mid-race…..The feature finish was thrilling, but believe it or not it actually ranked second on the night. Coming through turn four of the final lap of the eighth and final heat race of the night, the top four cars of Darren Hagen, Robert Ballou, Bryan Clausen, and Kevin Swindell were racing hard within about six car-lengths of each other, but when Ballou clipped the rear end of Hagen’s #12 and got him loose exiting turn four the scramble was on as the field sprinted to the stripe four-wide. Thank goodness for the transponders once again as I don’t know how a scorer would have been able to properly place all four drivers using the naked eye with Swindell taking the win ahead of Ballou, Hagen and Clausen. With the sponsor’s product award presentations to the heat race winners up next, Swindell pulled onto the frontstretch and celebrated as if he had just won a feature race including a bow to the crowd. And, when Ballou was asked about the finish, he told the crowd “We’re going to try to put on a show for you. Last night wasn’t very good, this is real racing” which of course drew a roar of approval……Damian Gardner was the winner on tonight’s drivers foot race.
The Ultimate Challenge will be a tough act to follow, but up next are my two favorite nights of racing, the qualifying nights for the Super Clean Knoxville Nationals. Five fully inverted ten-car heat races each night with all of the top names in the sport in attendance. I sure do love living in Iowa!!!
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