Combine a tire-eating track surface with a rulebook that emphasizes pit and tire strategy, and you’ve got the kind of race that challenges drivers and teams to be smarter, not just faster, than their competitors. The KOMA Unwind Modified Madness Series season opener at Hickory Speedway was just that: a contest of wits and strategy where having a fast car only mattered if paired with a perfect game plan. On Saturday night, Burt Myers had both.
Myers, the defending champion of the KOMA tour, grabbed his third win in the fledgling modified series, besting two-time Valenti Modified Racing Series champion Chris Pasteryak, younger brother Jason, and two-time 2014 KOMA series winner Zach Brewer. Veteran racer Gary Putnam completed a rousing comeback effort by grabbing fifth place after going a lap down early in the race.
For most teams, the strategizing began long before the green flag waved, with several drivers, including polesitter and 2013 Whelen Modified Tour champion Ryan Preece, telling Race22 they planned on intentionally dropping back in order to conserve tires. Others, like 16-year-old Spencer Davis, who is embarking on his sophomore year piloting a modified, said the plan was to get to the front and stay there, hoping track position would pay off in the latter stages.
The different philosophies arose due to the series’ unique tire and pit stop rules. Teams have the option to bolt on one new tire during the race, but a pit stop in which the car is jacked up off the ground is mandatory. Hickory’s reputation for tire wear all but guaranteed teams would opt for the fresh rubber, but anxiety centered around when to make the mandatory pit stop, since pitting too early would mean running on older tires at the end, while pitting too late would mean losing track position late in the race or possibly having to pit under green.
For Myers, the combination of battling a weathered racing surface and doing all the strategy calculations made a for a tense road to victory.
After running in the top three in the middle stages, he pitted during a lap 79 caution with the majority of the lead lap cars. Coming out fifth, he looked to be in good position since the top two cars, Davis and Pasteryak, had taken their fresh tires tire on lap 50. But Myers surrendered third place to pit again 10 laps later, this time swapping left side tires. This put him behind several of the race’s fastest cars, restarting in 10th with 37 laps to go.
“I was a little worried,” Myers told Race22 after the race.
“When it gets down to the end there, even if you have a good car, track position is key. I saw that [Pasteryak] and [Brewer] were running a little harder than they needed to. But it gets there to the end of the race, and that’s what you do.”
While Myers used a string of late cautions to work his way forward, early leader Davis, who spent the first half of the race half a lap ahead of second place, started slipping back. The young driver out of Dawsonville, Ga., first lost the lead to Pasteryak, then fell back into the hornet’s nest of drivers with fresher tires.
According to Davis, Pasteryak getting ahead of his was the turning point. “Once he controlled the restarts, he played them to his advantage. Restarts are a killer on tires when you can’t control them,” he said.
Pasteryak looked like he would be able to hold on despite being on older tires, even surviving a hard charge by Brewer on a lap 101 in which Brewer actually passed him on the outside only to have a caution reset the lineup with Pasteryak out front. On the ensuing restart Pasteryak got a better launch and was able to keep Brewer behind him, only to have the caution wave a couple laps later for a pit road cone getting bumped into the racing groove.
Pasteryak again pulled away from Brewer on the next restart, but at this point it was third-place Myers who was coming to life. After several laps rubbing the shine off Brewer’s back bumper, Myers moved into second place. With 5 laps to go, he set to work on Pasteryak, making several attempts on the outside lane before crossing over and zooming past Pasternak on the inside going down the backstretch.
Myers cited the decision to pit late and swap the left tires as the pivotal point in his race, saying that he saw other cars switching lefts as he was making his first pit stop, and it reminded him of losing races last year to cars that used the same strategy. Despite the intensity of on-track action, Myers said he bears the responsibility of making those strategy calls himself, and he felt their only shot at winning was to pit again.
“I told the guys, I probably could have finished third the way it was,” says Myers, “but we didn’t come here to finish third.”
The victory also marked another chapter in the 2015 battle between the LFR and Troyer chassis. Troyer dominated early season action at New Smyrna and the NWSMT season opener at Caraway the previous week. Myer’s victory marked LFR’s first big win of 2015, and continues the run of success that he has since switching to LFR midway through 2014.
Preece, carrying the banner for the new Troyer chassis, struggled with a tight car late in the race, and despite conserving tires early didn’t have the speed at the finish to make up track position. He finished 6th.
“We saved tires all race. Even coming up through the field, I was saving them,” said Preece. “We had a pretty decent car in the first half. But all those other guys, when they put tires on they just had better than what I had.”
Preece says the team will regroup and likely be at Caraway next weekend for the second round of the NWSMT season. Myers will try to carry the momentum from his win back to Caraway, before the KOMA tour resumes competition in May at Kingsport Speedway.
