Story by: Corey Latham ~ [email protected]

Callaway, VA(April 28, 2011) — Through the years, we have been to all sorts of tracks all up and down the East coast and some further West. You have different characteristics of each track that makes them special, Bowman Gray with the drama and wild crowd, Greenville-Pickens with it’s party atmosphere tier parking on the backstretch, Hickory with it’s rich history, and way down South there’s New Smyrna with it’s shear speed. But, to this day nothing really compares with the little bullring in the Southern Virgina mountains known as Franklin County Speedway.

The little 3/8’s mile track with 22 degrees of banking has been host to some of the greatest racers in the history of short track racing, Jimmie Hensley, Paul Radford, Barry Beggarly, Harry Gant, and even the “Rapid Roman” Richie Evens who held the track record for nearly 30 years until it was beat by James Civali in 2009. But the glory days have been few and far between in recent years until this season as the Late Model Stock division has had better car count than It’s more prestigious VA neighboring tracks.

The night started out with spectator racing, as anyone who wanted to bring their personal cars out and race against another car around the track could…….I’m telling you people, there is no place like this. You look around the pits and there is a guy with deer antlers on his head, another that looks like the twin brother of Hillbilly Jim from the early WWF days, and most noticeably, race cars everywhere. Bobby Gillespie would take the pole from Kingery for the race, but that was just an opinion to Kingery as they do the timing with handheld stopwatches, he said by his watch he was faster. I wouldn’t expect any racer anywhere to say any different in that position.

As we get some of the support races out of the way with drama already played to the max (the track has a reality TV show going on called “Buck Wild”), we line up the Late Models as 11 of them will go for 50 laps, down from the 17 they had the week before. Kingery would jump to the lead on the start but Gillespie would give chase the whole night as the two drivers became the class of the field.

The best battle of the evening was between Kyle Dudley in third and Eddie Walls who wanted it. Dudley was fresh off a fourth place finish in the Limited Late Models at Motor Mile Speedway just a couple of hours before the start. Dudley would hold off Walls but not before some contact was made as Walls tried each lap to get under him, only to have the door slam shut numerous times with Walls eventually bouncing off the inside curbing killing his chances to advance his position.

Up front Kingery was long gone from Gillespie with the third place car of Eddie Young even further back. But this is Franklin County, and if the show gets boring, they will do what it takes to liven things up. And they did just that throwing a caution with five laps to go, other tracks should take a hint on this play.

Kingery would jump away once again with Gillespie getting away from Young, but Young has his hands full with Dudley who muscles his way by with two laps to go and picks up the third spot giving him two top fives at two different tracks in two different divisions in two hours. Pretty impressive if you ask me.

In victory lane Kingery was all smiles, as the week before saw him have a strong car all day but go down with engine problems in the race. And in usual Kingery fashion he was talking it up as only Kelly can, another thing that more racers all over need to take heed to, personality takes you everywhere.

As the cars and TV cameras pulled away from victory lane on the frontstretch, Gillespie decides to spin his car around to go back the other way, only problem was that Dudley was already pulling off the right way to go around to the pits. The two hit each other head-on slighty and the fans go wild, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Deer antler hats, professional wrestler look-alikes from years gone past, unwritten rules for disqualification if you stink up the show and one bad to the bone racetrack, that my friends is Franklin County. Everybody needs to experience this at least once, I’m betting you come back for more.

Results
1. Kelly Kingery
2. Bobby Gillespie
3. Kyle Dudley
4. Eddie Young
5. Eddie Walls
6. Kevin Parker
7. Dan Martin
8. Johnathan Smith
9. Calvin Brooks
10. Larry Hodges
11. Teddy Lawless