Nate Beuseling and Jesse Sobbing both parlayed front row starting spots into flag-to-flag non-stop feature wins during part two of the annual Harris Clash at the Knoxville Raceway Tuesday night.
Beuseling beat fellow front row starter Todd Cooney to turn one at the start of the 35-lap main event for the Deery Brothers Summer Series for IMCA Late Models while the field shuffled for position behind them. Third-starting Brian Harris drifted up the track in turn two allowing third and fourth row starters Mike Garland and Jay Johnson, as well as fourth starting Matt Strassheim, to charge past exiting turn two and down the straightaway. A racetrack that saw drivers using at least three grooves during the qualifying events now saw everybody scrambling for the bottom to quickly make this one a single-file affair. The top six mentioned above did not change position for the remainder of the race, but there was some movement mid-pack. Series point contenders Ray Guss Jr. and Andy Eckrich had started thirteenth and fifteenth respectively and after being a part of the parade for the first half of the event, Guss found that the next line up on the track was usable as he drove around Darrel DeFrance in turns three and four. Seeing this both Nick Marolf and Eckrich followed suit and the trio made up a full straightaway on the sixth-place car of Harris before running out of laps.
Beuseling, who led for most of the 2010 Slocum Memorial at 34 Raceway before yielding to Mark Burgtorf, nearly avoided a big mistake when he went to the cushion in turn one trying to get by the lapped car of Todd Malmstrom. This allowed Cooney to close in quickly but Nate was able to get back to the bottom before the veteran from Des Moines could take away the preferred groove. From that point on Beuseling used patience with lapped traffic and went on to take his first career Deery Series victory on the big stage that is the Knoxville Raceway. Cooney, Garland, Johnson and Strassheim completed the top five with Harris, Guss Jr., Marolf, Eckrich and Justin Reed next in line.
LM Notes…..Todd Malmstrom earned his feature start by riding the cushion past T.J. Criss on the final lap of the second heat to take the third and final transfer position……Criss later inherited the fourth and final transfer out of the first B-Main when Mike Murphy Jr.’s engine belched fire on the final lap while running fourth…..None of the top four in Series points were able to transfer out of the heat races as Andy Eckrich, Ray Guss Jr., Terry Neal and Tom Darbyshire all started seventh or worse in the qualifiers. The fifth ranked driver in points, Tyler Bruening, started fourth and won the fourth heat race in a tight battle with Nate Beuseling. Neal was 14th in the main event, Bruening was 16th and Darbyshire finished 18th……Spencer Diercks raised some eyebrows as the Hard Charger provisional, but numbers don’t lie……Points provisionals were Darbyshire, rookie-of-the-year contender Eric Sanders and Joel Callahan….. Mike Murphy Jr. would have been a points provisional if not for the broken motor and Charlie McKenna turned down the opportunity to start saving his provisional (drivers are limited to three a year I believe) for another night…..Thirty-eight Late Models were in attendance including my first look this year at Drew Johnson and Dave Hubbard…..The Deery Series next moves to the quarter-mile oval at the Cedar County Raceway in Tipton on Tuesday, August 2nd.
With fifty-nine Sport Mods on hand there was plenty of talent throughout the field, but I couldn’t help to hope for a shootout between the state’s two winningest drivers in any division this year, Jesse Sobbing and Cayden Carter. That did not happen.
Sobbing started outside of row one for the twenty-lap feature and even though pole-sitter Beau Kaplan had the advantage going into turn one at the drop of the green, Sobbing powered through the middle groove and went down the backstretch with a lead that was already starting to grow. This field of twenty-four did not all decide to run the bottom after watching the Late Model feature as drivers worked the half-mile from bottom to top although that inside line still seemed to be the way around. With Sobbing on the fly, the race for second was a good one mid-race as sixth-starting Austin Kaplan closed in on Jim Gillenwater. The two battled it out for a few laps before Kaplan took the spot and then tried to run down the leader. A little further back Cayden Carter was trying to get to the front after starting in row four, but on this night it would be his cousin Carter VanDenBerg who would make the big move. The redraw loser, VanDenBerg started twelfth and gradually drove past the competition taking fifth from his cousin mid-race. VanDenBerg would later get by Beau Kaplan for fourth while Carter would fade to ninth at the checkers.
Even though Austin Kaplan was able to cut into the lead a bit, Sobbing still won by a full straightaway taking his 28th All Iowa Points paying win of 2011, and that does not count the number of times that he has won on Thursday nights in Columbus, Nebraska. Gillenwater was solid in third, VanDenBerg took fourth with Beau Kaplan fifth. Young Tyler Droste finished in sixth, Doug Smith finished where he started in seventh, while Racer Hulin moved from the seventh row up to eighth. Cayden Carter and Andy Tiernan rounded out the top ten.
Cautions were few and far between during the qualifying events and as mentioned both features went flag-to-flag so we were on our way home shortly after 10:30. A big thanks to Bob Harris for all he does with this event and we look forward to spending a lot of time at the Knoxville Raceway over the next two weeks for the Sprint Car Nationals. Next up on our schedule is the Corn Belt Clash event at the CJ Raceway this Thursday night, then with Morgan returning home from school on Saturday he has his sights on one or both of the MOWA Sprint Car events scheduled for this weekend. We’ll see what his Momma has to say about that…..
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