Commentary by: Rob Staley — [email protected]
Danville, VA(May 6, 2009) — Maybe I should take a week off more often.
I nailed the fantasy picks at Motor Mile last weekend. Unfortunately my hot streak was halted by rainouts at Newport and Greenville-Pickens. Speaking of Motor Mile, I never thought we would see 33 cars show up for twins. Congrats to Phillip Morris and Tommy Lemons Jr. on their wins.
One of the interesting cars at Motor Mile was that of Bob Davis who made a rare stab at oval track racing. His #19 Chevy is a common competitor at Virginia International Raceway and he usually runs well atthe 3.27 mile road course. Luck wasn’t with him last week as he failed to make the start of the late model show. The Davis car can be seen on the archive page (Rob Makes Right/Wrong? Turns) in a 2008 photo from VIR.
Twin races are the order of the day this weekend as Caraway, South Boston, Newport, Tri-County and Orange County all have doubled up for Mothers Day weekend. From the early entry list, it appears Caraway will again have a huge car count and hopefully the fan attendance will improve from the previous races at this nice facility.
South Boston offers mothers a $5.00 admission for this Saturday evenings races and of course $5.00 will get everyone in at Tri-County every week, but there aren’t any promotions to speak of at the other two tracks with Caraway charging a whopping $20.00 each to get through the gate.
The strong Grand Stock field at OCS will be boosted by the first 2009 appearance of constant front runner Eddie Capps as that team completed work on the car this week. 16 cars took the green in that class in the season opener. It will be interesting to see how the car counts are for Limited and Late Models with South Boston running just up the road.
During my vacation, I attended the Nationwide event in Richmond and I couldn’t help but think how good a show late models could put on there. A big late model race was scheduled there in October 1998, but was canceled when the July NASCAR Sprint Cup Daytona race got shot down by forest fires and got pushed back to the same date as the Richmond LMSC. For whatever reason, the late models have never been scheduled there again, but hopefully someone will resurrect that idea!
Well, I made it through the entire column without dwelling on car counts, but I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about that next week. Enjoy your racing this Mothers Day weekend and Happy Mothers Day to everyone!
