Okay, so first let's talk a little basketball. For all of you Iowa fans who are wondering what in the world is happening to the Hawkeyes, you are probably not one of those fans who watched Division II Augustana South Dakota beat the Hawks on a last second shot back on November 6th. Now granted Augustana has gone on to post a 26-2 record and will likely be one of the top seeds in the D2 National Tourney, but it was still a Division II team coming into Carver Hawkeye and looking like the better team. I was there, I saw it, so I have been amazed at just how well the Hawks have played up until the last three weeks and it has become quite obvious that during that run we were outplaying our expectations. Now that our bench players are again playing like bench players and Uthoff and Jok (a combined 9 for 27 from the field at Ohio State Sunday) are showing that they are human perhaps we are now seeing the true level that this team lands?
If you weren't there on November 6th, you just think that the Hawks are in a slump. I do hope that you are right and that I am wrong.
Dirt Late Model racing did have a couple of touring events going on this weekend with the Southern Nationals Bonus Series at 411 Speedway in Tennessee on Saturday and a Southern All Star doubleheader at Cochran Speedway in Georgia on Saturday and Sunday. At 411 Cory Hedgecock started on the pole and went the entire distance to take the win while at Cochran second-starting Brandon Overton passed pole-sitter Casey Roberts to win on Saturday while Roberts went flag-to-flag from the pole to win on Sunday. I watched video from all three events and they were even more boring than you might have imagined from that description. As an announcer, do you really have to credit M.C. Hammer for using the line "It's Hammertime off turn four" as the field takes the green? Maybe it's an ASCAP thing or something, but I digress.
It should not come to a surprise that there would be little action for the lead given the straight up qualifying procedures used by both of these southern series, an area of the country where the word "invert" is not even in the vocabulary of race officials, but it follows a Speed Weeks where the statistics were similar.
Using the stats compiled by the fine folks at Dirt On Dirt in the 18 Super Late Model feature events held in Georgia and Florida the average number of lead changes was 0.888. Only one feature had more than one lead change and amazingly that came during the day race at Golden Isles when there were three lead changes. The average starting spot of the 18 winners was 3.9 and if you throw out the thrilling charge from 14th by Josh Richards at Volusia on February 19th that average drops to 3.3. Eight of the winners started from the front row while six of the winners started fourth on the grid. Draw your own conclusions, but you have to admit that it is fun to be able to slip out to an IMCA weekly show once in awhile where the fastest guys don't get to start up front.
Todd Staley's United States Modified Touring Series had a big weekend with more than 65 cars signing in each night at the Ark-La-Tex Speedway for a tripleheader that found Stormy Scott, Ryan Gustin and Jake Gallardo in victory lane. The caravan of Modifieds next heads to the Southern Oklahoma Speedway in Ardmore for another three race weekend.
If you were thinking about heading to Springfield, Missouri, for the B-Mod Nationals this weekend, don't. The event was cancelled because they did not receive the minimum of 100 entries required to proceed with the event.
In last week's Notebook I talked about some of the interesting items that I found while compiling the Special Events schedule for Positively Racing and one that I missed until today was the fact that there are two county fairs claiming to have the Sprint Invaders scheduled for Thursday July 14th. While the Davis County Fair and the Bloomfield Speedway lists the Invaders for that night, the latest release of the series schedule shows the winged 360's at the Cedar County Fair in Tipton.
The season opener for the Shottenkirk.com Sprint Invaders will be Saturday April 2nd at 34 Raceway in Burlington and my announcing partner Bill Wright will have to handle that one without me as Christine and I will be attending a wedding that weekend. It will take me out of play for all of the IMCA Frostbuster events as well.
The month of March begins tomorrow and racing season will soon again be here in the Midwest!
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