Wild Night With the Tour

Welcome to another installment of The View From Turn One. Tonight, we cover the action from the August 11th program, one that was fun-fueled for all its worth. I would like to point out ahead of time that it was the Whelen Modified Tour that came to the half mile that evening for the New England Dodge Dealers 150. During a rousing game of time trials, Tony Hirschman set the fastest time with an 18.359. After a top-8 redraw (or during that time), we had some Stafford divisions that were on the track for their features.

Our first feature of the night was the Limited Late Models. On the opening lap, a multi-car accident went down in turn two, causing all sorts of confusion and chaos to occur. That was cleaned up and the race went back to green. Yet as with most of the features, the banana came flying back out...this time on lap-18. Charlie Newman stalled in turns one and two, bringing another caution to the table. And the restart? Well, that wasn't very good to Andrew Durand. He spun in turn four, prompting the final caution of the event. The green-white-checkered situation was in place and that actually worked out in the end. Robert Dow saw the good side of the cause, and he effectively took down his first win of the 2006 season. George Nocera, Sean Foster, and Paul Conte followed him to the line.

Next was the Late Models, and did they put on a show for the audience. Once again, we had an opening lap caution. Tom Fearn took a nice spin into the turn one wall, but he would recover from it and finish strong at the end of the race. (Technical inspection would say other things.) Lap-8 saw a multi-car accident in turns one and two which saw a few cars beaten and bruised. The final caution was on lap-21 when John Severns and Billy Snow spun in turns one and two. And then...it was a nice race to the finish. Quite a few cars had a shot of winning the race, and all four were former feature winners in the division. Yet Jim Peterson had the best of everyone, and he came to the line for his second win of the season. Rounding out the top-4 were Fearn, Woody Pitkat, and Todd Owen. Of course, if you read about Fearn spinning out in the opening lap, then you might have seen a comment regarding tech inspection. Well, Fearn was disqualified for having improperly mounted additional weight. His second place was stripped from him.

Then...oh, we had a blast with the SK Modifieds. It literally went down to the wire. On lap-4, Vincent Anglace took a nice spin through turn four. On the next lap, Anglace and Eric Berndt collided on the frontstretch. And if you thought that the frontstretch was a safe place, lap-13 proved this theory wrong. Brad Hietala nailed the frontstretch wall and stopped right in front of my usual grandstand seating area. After a nice cleanup detail and two more laps of racing, Lloyd Agor was involved in an accident on the backstretch. Again, that was cleaned up and one lap later, another caution. Woody Pitkat was taken out in turn three. The next (and final) caution didn't occur until lap-39 when one of the Xtra-Mart team cars (and I wrote Zach Sylvester's number, though I may be wrong on that) spun in turn four. This set up nine laps to the checkered, and it was a fierce race. On the very last lap (and in the very last turn), Kenny Horton overpowered Chris Jones and won the race with inches to spare. Ted Christopher and Bo Gunning came across in third and fourth, respectively.

The Tour race was next, and that generated quite a bit of controversy within itself. Without giving you every bit of trouble (due to the fact that I'm a little tired and I don't have full notes for the race), there was one big accident that took quite a bit of cleanup time. Some of the drivers involved in it were Jamie Tomaino and pole sitter Tony Hirschman. Yet in the end, it was all James Civali. He held off a hard-fought charge from Reggie Ruggerio to win his first Whelen Modified Tour feature. As Ruggerio spun in turn one in the final two laps of the race, this let Ken Barry, Chris Pasteryak, Matt Hirschman, and Mike Stefanik finish within the top-5.

With the longest race of the night out of the way, we get to the shortest race of the night: The SK Lights. I mean it was short when I mention the fact that there were no cautions during the duration of the 20-laps that were run. (Although there might have been a few incidents where the yellow might have come out. Brit Andersen took this into account when he finished the race in first place. As of the time I took my notes, I had Wade Mattesen, Chris Matthews, and Glen Reen as the next three cars. But like in the Late Model feature, let the tech inspection prove otherwise. Mattesen's car had an inoperative RPM rev limiter (whatever those are), and he was disqualified from the feature finish.

Finally, the DARE Stocks came out onto the track. (This was at around 11:30pm EST.) On lap-8, Rob Lawrence spins in turn two. On lap-11, there were multiple spinouts. Too many to count, exactly, and too many to pick which one brought out the caution. So in my opinion, whoever spun before and during the caution was to blame. Then on lap-14, we had a blast. The original lap-14 caution came out for Jesse Hinze when he spun in turns three and four. On the restart, Lori-Jo Rzeszutek and Duane Provost got caught up in an accident in turn four. this led us to the second green-white-checkered situation of the night. Raymond Grassetti didn't mind this, though, as he led the field to the checkers. David Gambacorta, Joseph Scata, and Jeff Jolly rounded out the top-4. Yet during the feature, a track official and a track officer came up to the grandstands near the handicapper's booth (this was in the pits, mind you) and took away a radio belonging to a crew member from Scata's crew. Now, the DARE Stocks are not allowed to have any two-way communications with anyone. They're only allowed to listen to the track officials in the scorer's stand. With the confiscated radio, Scata was disqualified from the feature finish.

Oh, that was a wild night, considering I didn't get home until near one in the morning. (As I sigh.) Okay, more action comes your way Friday night. It's a regular week for the local boys, and I'll cover all the ups and downs...probably from the pits again. Until then, have a nice rest of the week.