After two completely enjoyable days of non-racing entertainment in Chicago I made it back home to Iowa in time to get to the Knoxville Raceway Sunday night for the track's Second Annual Shootout for the Modifieds, Stock Cars, Sport Mods and Hobby Stocks. I have worked with my friend Bill Wright in the past on live internet radio broadcasts and more recently the two of us have paired up to do the p.a. announcing for the 2013 Brockway Mechanical and Roofing Sprint Invaders events. At Knoxville though Bill is the person in charge of keeping the website up to date including the live results page where you can find virtual up-to-the-minute lineups and results from each event as it progresses through the evening at the world famous track.
Since Bill is primarily an open wheel fan he asked if I would be interested in helping him with the shootout on Sunday night since I would be much more familiar with the names and numbers of the drivers participating in these four divisions than he would, so of course I said "yes". And after doing this for one night I am amazed at the effort that Bill puts into this!! After making sure that all of the drivers' numbers, names and hometowns were correct we then entered the lineups for each heat race into the system. Bill and I then rotated from heat to heat typing in some basic narration as the race was run and then had to confirm the official finish with scoring before entering that into the system. As each class concluded their heat races there was then B-Main and partial A-Main lineups to be entered, etc., etc.
With my untrained, but still fairly well advanced hunt and peck typing skills, I was able to watch very little of the racing action going on in front of me as I did my best to make sure that people who were not in attendance could get a feel for what was going on to go along with their continuously updated results. And I was only doing half of the work!!! All that I could think of was how much work this must be for Bill now that he usually does this alone on a regular race night although with sprint cars and the fact that they need to be push started perhaps gives him a little more time to complete the info for each event before the next one takes the green. As I drove home and reflected on how different of a race night experience this was for me all I could think of was the internet forum people who seem to "demand" that someone provide updated results from a track that either they were not able to, or chose not to attend themselves. There are some fans, like our colleague Brian Neal and our buddy Craig (fasttrackfan) who do take the time to keep people updated with "live" results from the events that they are attending and you should really thank them because it definitely takes away from the experience of actually being at the night of racing!
Will I ever do it again? If my friend Bill W. needs me to help him, yes absolutely, but you will NEVER see me on Twitter or on a forum providing results as an event unfolds. I am "old school" or just plain old, but I prefer to enjoy the night of racing in full, then think about it as I am driving home before trying to put a summary into words for you the readers of the Back Stretch. If that approach is outdated then so be it, at least I know that my mother will read this stuff once in awhile......if I ask her to.
As for the bits and pieces of racing that I did see I would have to say that overall the second version of this event was better than last year's often rescheduled first run. We didn't see the one "classic battle" that we did in the Stock Cars last year, but we did see good action with drivers using more than one groove throughout the evening. Dylan Smith repeated his win in the Modified division and while last year he went flag-to-flag from the pole, last night he started eighth and had to pick his way to the front before taking the lead in three-wide fashion on a mid-race restart. Jesse Sobbing is surprising nobody with his early season success as a rookie in the Modified division as he ran second, given their history with each other Josh Foster and Richie Gustin were interesting to watch in both their heat race and the feature as they finished third and fourth while Todd Shute moved from tenth to fifth. I was glad that Nevada driver Cory Sample was able to race his way into the show through the B-Main and he then had some fun at Knoxville by working his way up from row nine to tenth.
Lance Borgman was fast all night moving from seventh to second in his heat race and then in the feature he came from the fifth row to battle David Brandies and Joe Zadina for the lead and the eventual win taking the Stock Car top prize money back to Beatrice, Nebraska. Surprisingly the Sport Mod division had the lowest car count at twenty-four and it was a clean sweep for Austin Kaplan. Glenn Gladson Jr. and Carter VanDenBerg were fast, but not fast enough to catch Kaplan as they ran second and third while the owner of the Springfield Speedway in Missouri, Jerry Hoffman brought his car north to finish in sixth. In the Hobby Stock feature Mike Hughes and Corey Madden ran the first few laps side-by-side and then later Hughes had to race his way past veteran Bill Bonnett in order to secure the victory in the first night out for his #11.
The final checkered flag waved at 9:03 p.m. and the drivers headed for home on a Sunday night excited to have had the rare opportunity to race in one of these four divisions at Knoxville.
Here's hoping that the forecasted rain holds off long enough for Wednesday night's show at the Southern Iowa Speedway in Oskaloosa as the IMCA Late Models will join the weekly program for the evening. Then next week I hope to see the 2013 opener for the Hawkeye Dirt Tour Modifieds in Vinton on Tuesday night before heading to one of my favorite tracks, the Dubuque Speedway on Wednesday for the Deery Brothers Summer Series. Hope to see you there!
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