RICK @ the RACES (8 Mar 2009)

It was another typical quiet weekend in March with nothing much happening locally as far as racing is concerned . There was a special event taking place in Rhode Island that many of my TRACKCHASING friends were attending, but I couldn’t justify the expense of the long road trip. Very little racing takes place in the tiny state, so when it was announced that indoor Three Quarter Midget Racing was taking place at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence it was an obvious target. I would like to have attended, but after the cost of my recent Florida tour and a forthcoming trip to Texas, I had to miss out. Ted Christopher who was the NASCAR Tour Modified winner when I was at New Smyrna FL last month took the big race honors.

This weekend I stayed local and attended the Mohawk International Raceway awards presentation, drivers meeting and race party held at the Elks Lodge in Massena NY.

Before the lunchtime event I visited the track in nearby Hogansburg to check out the reconstruction progress.

Since my last visit in December a second new building has been built and the floodlighting has been erected.

Raceway PR man Bill Smith opened the meeting where the plans for the 2009 season were outlined. Once work has been completed, the action will kick off at 7-45 on Friday nights.

 

 

Opening night is scheduled for May 22.

Once again my weekend was rounded off by watching the NASCAR SPRINT CUP race on the TV. This time it was from the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Georgia and was won by Kurt Busch, brother of last weeks Las Vegas winner Kyle.

I also spent time over the weekend finishing off my ‘RETRO’ report from 1974 which was the year I had my first race. Check out the RETRO section.

I must now mention some of my recent correspondence.

A week or so ago, I had a message from my old friend Nigel Harradine in the UK. My first BriSCA F1 stock car was raced by ‘Nige’ in the early 1970’s before his attentions moved to BriSCA F2. He competed in this division right through to the late 70’s before ‘hanging up his helmet’. In 2008 he returned to the track for a few races at Mildenhall and now has plans to be back again this year in a Formula 2 type car at his local Swaffham track in Norfolk.

I’ve also been in contact with Kai Goddard in Phoenix AZ. Kai’s father , Geoff was the 1971 and 1972 Spedworth Superstox World Champion . He told me that Geoff who now lives in South Africa will be visiting him in the USA this summer and hopes to arrange a race where both of them could take part. That would be awesome, and I asked Kai to send me some photos if it materializes.

My good friend David Kipling in Vancouver BC has a great web site called www.oldstox.com and was recently contacted by BBC Radio Northampton in the UK for a radio interview. They were doing an item about local stock car racing legend Aubrey Leighton and were interested in what David could tell them about him. The interview went well, check it out.

Finaly, I must share a message I had from Carlo Dries in the small European country of Luxembourg. I visited his country twice while I was living in Europe but didn’t realize they had stock car racing there.

I asked Carlo for some info and this was his reply. Oh I wish I’d known about this 20 years ago !

Hi Rick here’s a little explanation about Stockcar Racing in Luxembourg:
Apparently the first race was held in Luxembourg City in 1954.
I saw an old newspaper article about this meeting once.
If that’s true we beat the english by a few months..
Around 1963 the racing started regularely on a few tracks around the country. From 63 till 68 around ten meetings per year were organized by the few clubs that existed at that time. The tracks were all on dirt and the organization was amateurish, renting a field, put a few barrels in the center, let’s go racing…For the 1969 season, 10 clubs organised  into the official Luxembourgish Stock-car Federation, still in charge 40 years later in 2009. In the 50’s and 60’s there were a lot of US Limousines in the country so the choice for the battlewagons was obvious.Big,fast and loud were the days..At one time in the seventies the sport was so popular that we had around 15 permanent Dirt Tracks in the country, if you know the size of Luxembourg that was a lot of tracks…But most  tracks were not  ovalshaped, in fact ovalracing was tried once or twice in 1980 but with the Stockcar and the Off Road-AutoCross (Grass)scene well established at that time it never took off…In the mid eighties spectator interest waned and a lot of tracks had to close due to environmental or other issues and finding big US cars became much harder, so at the end of the eighties the big cars were sadly dropped in favour of the Ford Granada. Nowadays the races take place on only 3 permanent tracks that are left but spectator interest has grown back over the last decade, around 3000 to 4000 people go to the races nowadays. The cars are split in two classes: Class 1 is for the big armoured Granadas that look a bit like the UK Saloon Stockcars and Class 2 is for the Bangerstyle cars up to 2 liters.
I will send you a few pictures from the good old times and from today.
Cheers from Luxembourg
Carlo Dries