Tuesday Notebook: September 22, 2015

I had several notes jotted down to talk about, but my favorite (using that term loosely) internet troll has fired a direct shot across the bow of myself and my colleagues today so I may be a little distracted. My thoughts on that later.....

The battle for the 2015 Shottenkirk.com Sprint Invaders Championship went right down to the final night of action this past Saturday at 34 Raceway with three Knoxville-based drivers still in contention in one of the tightest point battles that the series has seen in several years. Last year's runner-up Tony Shilling entered the evening just one point ahead of defending champion Jon Agan, while Jamie Ball was still mathematically in the hunt as well as twenty-five drivers signed in. More than an inch of rain had fallen on the facility of Friday and since it came in three different waves the 3/8th-mile oval had soaked up the moisture like a sponge leading to a tacky, fast, but rough racing surface.

With points awarded in the heats and the dash Agan would start the feature with a five point edge on Shilling while Ball's title hopes were dashed when he had to win the B-Main to claim his starting spot in the feature. Joey Moughan would get the jump on the field in the 30-lap main event until his left front wheel came off as he was entering turn three and it literally flew over the tall retaining wall nearly hitting the turn four VIP suites at the speedway. Moughan's crew likely had an interesting hunt through a soybean field in the dark just to locate the missing wheel.

Colorado's Ricky Montgomery assumed the lead from there but when he stumbled on the tall cushion in turn two on lap nine local favorite Josh Schneiderman pounced on the mishap to take the lead. Agan who last year clinched the series championship here despite a DNF caused by a flat tire was being cautiously aggressive taking second away from Montgomery mid-race and when Ricky again hit that turn two cushion wrong on lap 23 it bit him hard this time as he went for a tumble.

As the red flag waved and drivers tried to stop as quickly as possible, Shilling had contact with another car breaking his front end and putting him in the infield for the restart. Agan saw this and would then pick up his challenge for the lead on the restart, but there was no stopping Schneiderman who zestfully celebrated a long awaited win in victory lane. Not far away Jon Agan celebrated as well earning a hard fought season championship where the only night that he held the point lead was on this the final one.

Earlier in the night at the driver's meeting Agan, as one of the organization's Board of Directors, announced that there will be a Sprint Invaders series again in 2016 and that there will be a meeting soon with representatives from the National Sprint League to decide if the Invaders will be one of the "regions" involved in the GOMUDDY.com 360 Series next year. Stay tuned.

Austen Becerra (Sport Mods), Tom Bowling Jr. (Stock Cars), Travis Stensland (Mod Lites) and Jeffrey DeLonjay (Four Cylinders) were also feature winners on a night where I enjoyed not only doing my Sprint Invaders announcing with partner Bill Wright, but also handled the rest of the show for outgoing track announcer Rich Adams. Perhaps one of the longest tenures of any track announcer anywhere, Rich handled the microphone as well as some administrative duties at 34 Raceway for the past eighteen years and always did a great job. I just hope that I still get a chance to see him from time to time so that he, I and our good friend Cliffy Schaeffer from Salem can swap some stories. You will be missed my friend!

I had been asked by Jerry Mackey awhile back to join him in Farley for the Saturday night finale of the Yankee Dirt Classic and due to my commitment with the Invaders I had to decline the enticing offer. As you probably know weather played havoc with the huge annual event taking two of the four days that were scheduled and making for a very busy Saturday show. With 59 IMCA Late Models in attendance along with 44 Hawkeye Dirt Tour Modifieds and 36 Sport Mods, plus stock Cars and Hobby Stocks as well it was long evening of racing. Jeff Aikey and Troy Cordes grabbed the headlines with their wins in the Late Models and the Modifieds respectively, but how about what Damon Marty accomplished in just one day of racing?

Murty finished third in the field of 15 IMCA Stock Cars during Wednesday night's qualifying race, but then chose to race the day/night doubleheader at Marshalltown on Saturday, another event that was affected by Friday's rainy weather. Murty finished second to Wisconsin's Greg Wichman during the afternoon program and then finished second to another Wisconsin driver Travis VanStraten in the evening program.  The two-time defending, and soon to be three-time All Iowa Points champion must have then checked with someone on how the evening was going at Farley before making the 130 mile tow in time to start, and win the Stock Car main event at the Yankee. Two runner-up finishes and one win at two different tracks in one day......okay, well technically not one day since it was reported that the Stock Car feature started at about 1 a.m. on Sunday, but still an amazing accomplishment and effort by "The Chelsea Charger".

This coming weekend I have been asked by my good friend Tony Paris to handle the microphone for the "Bottom Heavy Nationals" at the Scotland County Speedway as he has another commitment with a different kind of horsepower for the weekend. It will make for quite a busy race week ahead with the season championship night at the Southern Iowa Speedway in Oskaloosa on Wednesday followed by the opener of the Lucas Oil Knoxville Late Model Nationals on Thursday night preceding the doubleheader in Memphis, Missouri. I would love to make it five nights in a row with a trip to Quincy on Sunday night for the MOWA Sprint Car show, but that just might be pushing my luck a bit too far at home if you know what I mean!

You may not have noticed but in this past week we have had one track go by the wayside here in the state of Iowa while another one is springing back into action, and soon. Just five years ago I had the honor of handling the announcing duties at the first ever event held at the Clarke County Speedway in Osceola, but when I went to check on the results from their Season Championship event scheduled for this past Saturday night I saw that they were closing down the track for good. And, since it is on the property of the Nelson family this is not a case where somebody else is going to swoop in and try to keep it open. It really seemed like the track was gaining some ground in 2014 as car counts were increasing and the "every other week" schedule was unique. However this year, the car counts were back down under ten usually in every division except the Micro Sprints and that was enough to pull the plug. Young Colton Nelson did not race his Sport Mod at the family's track, but he has two feature wins to his credit up at Stuart this year and you can probably look for him to do some more Saturday night racing in the region now as well.

As Osceola closes the folks at the Blackbird Bend Speedway near Onawa have announced that they are back in business with a re-opening event to be held on Friday October 2nd. You may recall that the track built near the casino of the same name was washed away by the Missouri river flood of a few years back. It will now be interesting to see if it tries to run a weekly program again in 2016 in an area that seems to be already well saturated with weekly racing venues, two of them literally right across the street from each other.

Why is it that the Northwest Missouri State Fair in Bethany neither promotes its auto races outside of its own Facebook page, or even worse, does not put out any kind of results of those races? From what I heard they pay good money and draw a nice crowd to the facility that only races once a year, on Labor Day weekend. But despite the internet, Facebook and Blogs it still is a secret event!

Speaking of Facebook and Blogs, did you know that myself and my colleagues are killing other racing sites? That is the opinion of one Mr. Johnny Oberthein, a.k.a. raceaholic in this thread on iowastockcars.com. The one thing that this evil blogger has learned over the years is that you don't engage directly with Mr. Oberthein on a topic that he presents his views on because no matter how nicely you present your opposing view he will tuck his tail between his legs and start whining about how you are not allowing him to express his opinions. This is what he does with everybody, but especially with me he will never stay on topic and will NEVER answer a question directed at him. So, as you will see if you click on the thread I only offered up my analogy to his claim that "Hawkeye Racing News died because of race blogs" and then did exactly what he hates, gave people a link to one of my relevant blog posts :)

I have plenty of other things to say about his assertion, but frankly I have something more important to do right now as I need to mow the lawn. Check in tomorrow to see if I have the time or energy to respond and, if I don't, come back here on Thursday for a completely paid for and biased review of the Season Championships at the Southern Iowa Speedway in Oskaloosa.

As it should be clear to see by the name of the website and my bio on the home page, I'm not here to be a critic, I am here to promote the sport and I am proud to do so no matter what some self important old flagman/promoter/Godfather of four cylinder racing thinks.

See you on the Back Stretch!

An addendum to the Notebook, rather than devoting a specific blog post to raceaholic's nonsense.

Whenever Johnny makes a post like this you can bet that it was prompted by a specific incident and it looks to me like that was Dick and Joyce Eisele's reporting of the World Nationals at the Marshalltown Speedway. The day race was reported as being dusty but apparently Johnny would have liked to have had the Eisele's opinion on how that dust could have been avoided. After all, as he so often points out about himself, he has been to and put on daytime events where the dust was not a problem. Of course he then states that he wasn't there, but apparently he did not read "with the wind blowing into the stands" and it is likely that most people who would read the report would be able to understand the situation. Sure, Dick and Joyce could have made several suggestions on how to control the dust such as moving the grandstands to the back stretch for the day where they would be upwind, or a quick paving of the track for the day race and then removal of the asphalt prior to the night program, but you see Dick and Joyce don't write their blogs to tell Toby Kruse how to do his job better. They instead want to tell you about the races, who won, how they did it and give some other interesting tidbits of information along the way and they have a TREMENDOUS following of readers who appreciate their approach to how they write their blog.

Oberthein goes on to say that if he started his own blog that he would have significantly more hits because he would stir the pot and give his honest opinions. Then we would be treated to such hard hitting reports as:

Vinton, never a disappointment

Fair & Balanced Report Marshalltown

Unbiased race report Vinton

Yep, that is some hard hitting journalism right there, certain to draw in millions of page views from race fans who want the truth! And who don't really care about who was racing and who actually won.....

It would be easy for Johnny to establish his own blog, anybody can do it and it is FREE at www.blogspot.com. But you see the problem is that raceaholic doesn't really want to be a blogger because he derives his pleasure from arguing and manipulating the conversation to advance his own agenda and eventually pat himself on the back under the premise of trying to improve the sport.

So what really is "killing" racing sites and the forums that he so desperately needs to do that? Actually he may have hit the nail on the head in regard to Facebook as more and more I am seeing information and even good old fashioned arguments taking place there now rather than on the racing forums. And, the one plus to that evolution, is that people are now putting their names to their opinions rather than hiding behind a screen name on a forum. It is much harder to be an AWP on Facebook.

In my opinion though it is a thread like this one that stretches on for eight grueling pages primarily because the hero who is going to set the blogosphere straight said, "Heck yes I took pics and hope to put some up on here during my Christmas break" and then never delivered.

As I noted earlier, I make it very clear how this blog will be written, but if you think that you are not going to see anything "negative" on the Back Stretch then you must not be reading very closely. If an intermission runs too long you will see something along the lines of "after a lengthy intermission, the Sport Mod feature hit the track", or I will simply state that there was a 30 minute intermission. If the race was caution filled then you might see the term "yellow fever" used or I will simply state that there were seven cautions and the feature lasted forty minutes. I just don't see the need to blame someone or suggest alternatives, although you know that if you read this blog during the offseason I often discuss changes in the sport that I would like to see in general rather than calling out one specific track or driver. In fact, I have written before about "The Stupidest Rule in Racing" and I referred to it again in a race story from just a week ago. So when somebody makes the accusation that the Back Stretch is just sugar coated goo because a promoter rolled out the red carpet for me, it just tells me that the accuser is apparently not very good with his or her reading comprehension.

Or, maybe the accuser just loves controversy, and if that is what raceaholic thrives on then there are other bloggers and writers out there who have called promoters crooks and drivers stupid before. The thing that I have noticed about those folks though is that they don't seem to last for very long, so with thirty-seven years of writing about, and promoting the sport that I love under my belt now, I think that I will just keep on doing it the Positively Racing way.

But hey Johnny, thanks for sending some more readers our way!