ROANOKE, VA :: Roanoke veteran Dennis Holdren is coming off a career year in Late Model Stock competition, posting a pair of victories at Franklin County Speedway and Ace Speedway. He believes that his newfound pace will translate over to Ridgeway this weekend in the Martinsville DuPont Credit Union 300.
Despite making a handful of starts at Ace over the past several years, Holdren did not begin to consistently contend for wins until 2014 once he started “banging his head against the wall” over how to run closer to the front.
“We made change after change this year and finally, after changing everything, we found some things that worked,” Holdren told Race22.com on Wednesday afternoon. “We started going to Ace this year and started getting good results there as well.”
Holdren unloaded his successful Ace set-up at Martinsville last week for the Late Model open test and was surprised at the amount of speed it provided him on the paperclip half-mile.
“It rained while we were there so we couldn’t get the amount of track time that we wanted going in but we were pretty happy with what we had,” Holdren said. “We were able to run consistent lap times and our Ace set-up transferred remarkably well.”
As a native of Roanoke, Holdren places every Virginia tracks in the highest of regards but Martinsville is his obvious favorite. He says his father took him to his first Late Model stock race back in 1973 and decided from that moment that this is what he wanted to do.
“From there, we went to a bunch of the Modified races, sportsman races and the Winston Cup races,” Holdren said of Martinsville. “It’s a track that has been a part of my life from an early age and I’ve seen it prosper and progress. I want to be a big part of that story moving forward.”
Holdren finished ninth in the Late Model Stock race last season and did so thanks to a conservative approach that he again intends to utilize. His goal is to first qualify for the race, somewhere in the top-20, and make the 200-lap feature.
Should he make the race, Holdren intends to cruise around for the first 75-100 laps and let the field thin itself out from the frequent cautions and incidents that have long marred that event.
“History always seems to repeat itself,” Holdren said. “I’ve been in these races and I’ve watched them from the grandstand and I’ve seen a lot of them only have 15 cars running at the end due to the attrition. Last year we started 39th and finished ninth and most of those passes came either from guys falling out of the race or us saving our equipment for the end.”
The 2014 season has been a career-year for Dennis Holdren and he hopes Martinsville will provide a career-defining moment to go with it.
