Saturday, July 12, 2014

Stanbrough Opens Indiana Sprint Week With A Win In Gas City

Lebron is coming home! Lebron is coming home!! Are you tired of that non-stop coverage yet? Good, let's talk some racing.....

Indiana Sprint Week for the USAC Sprint Cars opened up Friday night in front of a capacity crowd at the Gas City I-69 Speedway with a spectacular field of 53 cars in attendance. Taking in the first event or two of this annual tour through the Hoosier state has been on my bucket list for some time now and with the extra push from my son Morgan we made the trip over for what would be our first ever visit to this quarter-mile speed plant.

Two bits of advice for anybody from our area who would make this trip in the future. First, arrive early because this place fills up and fast! We arrived just in time for qualifying and after finding a parking place in the "back forty" the best seat that we could find was in row three right near the entrance to turn one. Talk about watching a race from a different perspective! We had Sprint Cars setting it into the turn sometimes as close as twenty feet away from us and of course that meant that we were also in the firing zone for the little mud crumbs that get thrown up when that big right rear tire bites into a tacky race track. The second bit of advice is what led us to our own failure to meet the first bit of advice. Take the two lane highways that stay well north of Indianapolis! We blindly followed our GPS directions that kept us on the Interstates and, had there been no other cars on the road, I am sure that this route would have been the fastest. But on a Friday afternoon around Indianapolis the average speed on I-465 is about ten miles per hour and that ended up costing us nearly a full hour leading to a parking place that seemed to be in a different zip code and an up close and personal seat in the third row at a track where the grandstand is as close to the racing surface as you will ever find!

I love the USAC method of running the program as it definitely is not a case where the fast guys start up front all night. Drivers draw for their qualifying order, they do not do it in "groups" and the heat races are lined up with a six-car invert. This means that the fastest qualifier starts sixth in the first heat and with four heat races on the card tonight only the top four finishers in the heat race would advance. That means that the fastest qualifiers actually have to race and pass somebody in order to earn their way into the feature event. (Shocking!) The drivers who do not make the top four run a B-Main that is lined straight up by qualifying times. So, for example, when third-fastest qualifier Brady Bacon was not able to get into the top four during his heat race when he was caught up in a tangle that flattened a tire, he would start from the pole of the B-Main where the top six finishers would advance to the feature.

And finally the way that the feature is lined up is what I feel makes this format fair to the "fast guys", but very fan friendly in the way that it makes the drivers earn their starting spots. The six fastest drivers that transferred from the heats are inverted and start in the first three rows of the feature. And from row four on back, the remaining qualified drivers are lined straight up by their qualifying times. This meant that the B-Main winner, Brady Bacon, started seventh in the feature rather than behind the heat race qualifiers like he would under most other formats. So there you have it Late Model drivers and series, a lineup format that still rewards and protects the fastest qualifiers, but requires some actual racing from those "fast guys" in the heat races and the B-Main to make the show and, more imprtantly, to put on a show for the fans. Something you might want to consider?

Does this format always produce a great feature race? Well no, not always and unfortunately tonight was one of those nights. Jon Stanbrough and Justin Grant started from the front row of the thirty-lap finale and within a few laps almost everybody was digging around the bottom. Dave Darland who was the night's fastest qualifier and started sixth was one of the few who was working the cushion and looked like he could make some progress early, but after a few laps he started to lose positions and by lap ten he too settled for the bottom groove. USAC uses the layover flag and the drivers racing in the back were very courteous moving up off of the bottom to let the leaders race by, but with ten laps remaining Stanbrough came upon two drivers who were racing for position and when he had to check up for just a moment entering turn three, Grant went for the high line to take his one good shot at stealing the win. There just was not much of a bite up top though and when the traffic moved out of Stanbrough's way going into turn one Grant quickly returned to the bottom to keep from losing the runner-up position. And that would be how they would race the rest of the way to the checkers with Stanbrough taking the win and Grant finishing second. Fifth-starting Chris Windom finished in the third spot, Tracy Hines finished where he started in fourth and Chase Stockon took advantage of drivers who were trying the high side early on moving from thirteenth to fifth. Bacon was sixth, Shane Cockrum was seventh, Darland finished eighth, Jimmy Light was ninth and Bryan Clauson was tenth.

While the feature event was a bit anti-climatic the qualifying races were every bit worth the price of admission and we enjoyed our first visit to Gas City and the opening event of Indiana Sprint Week. Morgan made me promise that I would not use the line that with a name like Gas City you should either have a race track or a Bush's Baked Beans plant, but he should know by now that I seldom keep my promises.

UMP Modifieds and the USAC Limited Midgets ran in support and the Modifieds endeared themselves to the house full of Sprint Car fans by running a twenty-lap feature that was littered with nine caution flags. Randy Lines, a driver that we saw down at the Quincy Raceways on a Sunday night back in May, went flag-to-flag to take the win ahead of Chad Combs and Zeke McKenzie while Champaign, Illinois, driver Patrick Bruns topped a short field of six midgets.

As I wrap up this entry of the Back Stretch from a hotel in Kokomo we are watching the radar and weighing our options of staying here for night number two of Sprint Week or heading back toward home to catch the UMP Summer Nationals at 34 Raceway. Here's hoping that you can find a track in action near you on "race night", Saturday night!

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