What a beautiful day it is here in southeast Iowa! It will feel really weird to not be driving to Oskaloosa tonight as they take another week off of racing due to the State Fair going on. The Southern Iowa Speedway has three more Wednesday nights of racing on the schedule August 20th, August 27th and September 17th before closing out the 2014 season with the 28th Annual Musco Lighting Fall Challenge on October 3rd and 4th.
Hard to believe that we are talking about the "final events" of the season already, but that is my yearly realization that comes along with the completion of the Knoxville Nationals. That and the fact that my son Morgan keeps leaving me after Sprint Car racing's biggest event! Two years ago I was driving him out to California for graduate school and this past Sunday, after enjoying two weeks of sprint car racing at Knoxville, he had his car packed up and ready to move to a new job in Oklahoma City. I know that I can't keep him around forever, but if he keeps leaving me after Knoxville I am going to start dreading that week instead of looking forward to it.
My daughter Ashley turns 30 today, Happy Birthday Baby Girl! For those of you who have known me for awhile you may remember that Ashley's "summer job" for her final two years in high school was as the volunteer coordinator for the NKF Tour events. While most fathers have a hard time getting to spend just a few moments of quality time with their teenage daughters, I was blessed to be able to spend hours and even days on the road with mine. After spending time in three other countries for both work and her graduate education, Ashley Anne Wick is now the Biological Research Director at the Kalamazoo Natuare Center and she has become one of Michigan's experts on butterflies. Her mother and I are very proud!
I said all that I wanted to about the tragic accident in New York Saturday night in the final sentence of my Knoxville Nationals story, no need to add to the massive amount of clutter on the subject in this social media beast that now exists. I will say this though, I am shocked at the amount of misinformation that has been communicated in the actual news media on this story. Yes, I know that racing, and in particular short track racing, is something that has a lot of its own language and terms that the mainstream folks would know nothing about, but on a story of this magnitude I would have thought that they would have wanted to take a few minutes to do some research and perhaps consult some experts before rushing to the airwaves and on the internet. Some examples? One reporter referred to the dirt track as a NASCAR facility and that this race featured "funny cars". Listening to national radio on Sunday morning I learned that Stewart "had competed in Knoxville on Tuesday" (he drove a rental go kart in a celebrity appearance at Slideways) and that he was "not going to drive his NASCAR" that day. Even the local Quad Cities news anchor referred to Stewart's sprint car crash last year where he broke his leg as happening in Knoxville, not where it actually happened in Oskaloosa. All of this makes me question just how accurate the reporting is of other news stories, and especially those that are "breaking now".
More sprint car news since I am in that mode right now.......
I was a bit surprised to hear that Gas City's I-69 Speedway in Indiana was shutting down for the remainder of the 2014 season. The place was absolutely packed when Morgan and I visited for the Indiana Sprint Speedweek opener a few weeks back and I would have thought that the profit from that event alone would have been enough to carry the track through the season. I did talk briefly to a gentleman who was helping people find a parking place and he mentioned that up until that night the attendance had been down a bit, but he didn't give me the impression that the popular track was on the verge of closing. Hopefully this is not the first of several that we will hear of before the 2015 season opens. And who knows, this track itself might even bounce back for next year.
Donny Schatz scored his fourteenth win of the season with the World of Outlaws STP Sprint Cars last night at Junction Motor Speedway in McCool Junction, Nebraska, and he is now starting to pull away from Daryn Pittman and Paul McMahan in the points race. I didn't see Schatz outside of the car very much at Knoxville last week, but when I did it was obvious that he just exudes confidence right now and unless outside influences come into play I would expect him to add another World of Outlaws title to his already spectacular list of career accomplishments. By his eighth Knoxville Nationals title they had already tagged Steve Kinser as "The King". Schatz has more than earned the right to be called something along the lines of "Dominant Donny".
I would have interrupted my string of Sprint Car races if Osky were racing tonight, but I am very excited about the opportunity to get back to the track for three nights of action this coming weekend for the 1st Annual Sprint Invaders Nationals. For those of you reading this in present time look up and to the right for details as the Brockway Mechanical and Roofing Sprint Invaders will kickoff this big weekend on Friday at the Mountain Dew Bloomfield Speedway. I have been told that Chris Eggers and his crew have fixed the hole going into turn three so the track will be back to its usual racy self for what should be a big field of Sprint Cars. On Saturday night the purse jumps up to $2,034 to win as the Invaders return to 34 Raceway in Burlington for the traditional event that follows up the Knoxville Nationals. And then on Sunday night, for the first time ever, the Sprint Invaders will go head to head with the Speedway Motors ASCS Warrior Region at the Quincy Raceways!
Coming into this weekend Jon Agan leads the Sprint Invaders point standings by a slim margin over Tony Shilling and Josh Schneiderman with Mike Houseman Jr. and Brett Triplett filling out the top five. Jay Russell from Elwood, Kansas, leads the Warrior Region points followed closely by Jonathan Cornell, Randy Hibbs, Kyle Bellm and J.R. Topper.
It should be a great weekend of racing and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those ASCS Warrior Region drivers running the first two nights as well to size up the competition, and of course to go for their share of the prize money.
After that I immediately get the opportunity to break out of my Sprint Car streak with the Hawkeye Dirt Tour for IMCA Modifieds in Vinton on Monday night and an IMCA tripleheader at the Cedar County Raceway in Tipton on Tuesday night. Again, scroll up and to the right for more details as IMCA Stock Cars have been added to the already impressive double dip of the Deery Brothers Summer Series for IMCA late Models and the XSAN Hawkeye Dirt Tour IMCA Modifieds.
Wherever you should decide to go this weekend, make sure that you get out and support your local dirt track. Our sport has a big ol' magnifying glass on it right now so we need to show the rest of the population just how much fun it actually is to see what normally happens week after week at the tracks that we love. See you on the Back Stretch!
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