Fire and Flight

With its location just across the state line from Sioux City, Raceway Park in Jefferson, South Dakota, is one of our tracks where drivers earn All Iowa Points and is the Sunday night home of defending, and soon to be two-time All Iowa Points Modified champion Chris Abelson. Abelson now has more than a hundred point advantage over his nearest rival, so he could literally sit out the rest of the season and still be the champion, however he is also the current IMCA Modified National points leader and he just lost that Sunday night "home" for the rest of the season.

Following is a post from Greg Golden, promoter at Raceway Park in regard to an electrical fire that occurred during Sunday night's racing action.

"It’s Official.

Raceway Park is closed for the remaining of the 2015 season.

Sunday evening Raceway Park experienced an electrical fire that took out the track lights along with the electric in the concession stands, walk-in cooler and the well. Just two weeks ago we had an electrical problem and had an electrician come out and fix it. Now we’ve had a different panel go up in flames that caused major damage.

After talking with the fire marshal and electricians this will be a timely matter to get things fixed correctly, we will not be able to have things fixed by this weekend so after talking with IMCA we will be ending this season.

Unfortunately this happened at a bad time in the season with the Super Nationals just around the corner and the Iron Cup coming up at Park Jefferson Speedway. There are just too many conflicting dates. We had even considered moving the season over to Park Jefferson to finish out and were denied from IMCA.

After talking with IMCA the four divisions that did not get to race will all receive last place points in their division, leaving the driver positions in points the same. We will take the qualified cars and add the purse up for that division and divide by how many cars qualified so everyone gets equal pay.

We are very disappointed to end the season this way and would like to apologize, we are working on getting the electric fixed correctly to not have these problems in the future and keep everyone safe. The good thing is no one got hurt last night, it was a scary moment.

We would like to thank everyone who supported Raceway Park in 2015 and look forward to bigger and better things in 2016."

It is likely that this will not derail Abelson's quest for the National title either, but it may definitely have him looking for places to run such as Oskaloosa and Vinton when those two tracks run their season championship events later in September.

A couple of nasty Sprint Car wrecks to share with you today with the first one being the amazing flight taken by Ryan Bowers during the UMSS event at St. Croix Valley Speedway. I have seen Bowers race in person just once and that was last September when he showed up for the Thursday night Sprint Invaders show during the Yankee Dirt Classic in Farley and won. And, despite this wild ride, the young driver continues to lead the UMSS point standings.

The young lady who has already won two features in the 305 division at Knoxville this season, McKenna Haase took a wild ride on Saturday night at the 2:47 mark of this clip. Don't speed ahead though or you will miss a wild ride taken by Jim Simbro at the start. Haase plans to move up to the 360 division in 2016 where perhaps there will not be as many moving speed bumps as there are in her current class.

With another opportunity to spend a weekend at a Lake with good friends I am taking a second week in a row away from racing. Well, actually there is a track that you can hear the cars from their house on a Saturday night, so I might be successful in organizing a "feature race" run over to the races, you just never know. And while many others will target the Super Nationals next week, I have my eye on the Corn Belt Clash Late Models on the quarter-mile in Davenport on Friday night and the Tom Knowles Memorial at the Spoon River Speedway on Saturday night.

Specials season is upon us, get out and find a race in your area soon!