Solomito Steals Preece's Thompson Thunder

Thompson Speedway kicked off the Icebreaker of 2016, and it put the Ice in Icebreaker given the usual chilly mid-April temperatures that greeted the capacity crowd as well as the multiple features hitting the 5/8th miler.    In the larger sports world that Sunday the 1992 Houston Oiler-esque collapse of Jordan Speith stole all the headlines; at Thompson there wasn't a collapse, but the NASCAR Modified Tour did see an upset of a win.

Entering Sunday's plethora of features the favorite was Ryan Preece.  Driving both the #6 Mod Tour car as well as an SK-class Modified, Preece flew from a disappointing Friday night at Texas Motor Speedway in Johnny Davis' #01 racecar for the Icebreaker.   But a harbinger of the outcome of the 150-lapper for the Tour came in the SK-class feature as Preece had to pit after two early yellows and was never really a factor for the win.   The SK race shook into a showdown between Keith Rocco and Ted Christopher.  A Rowan Pennick spin set up a green-white-checker finish and Christopher got a huge run on the white flag but couldn't finish off the pass, even when a seven-car scramble set up another green-white-checker finish; Christopher's second shot wasn't enough to stop Keith Rocco.

What did become enough to stop Keith Rocco later on was his twin brother Jeff in the Late Model race.   The two basically monopolized the race until near halfway they were side by side and Jeff lost it in Three and they both wrecked hard, the kind of air-off-the-spoiler-flavored wreck we thought we'd last seen in the 1990s at the Cup and Busch/Xfinity level.    The same fate bit Rick Gentes and it all left William Wall with the win, his first in the Late Models at Thompson.

Amid that, the Pro All Star Series stockers went through a rough and competitive outing won by Garrett Hall.   Meanwhile Ryan Preece prepped for the Mod Tour 150.  Driving the #6, Preece seized the lead from polesitter Doug Coby and for 80 laps was unbeatable, putting seventeen of the field of 27 a lap down or more.   Jimmy Blewitt's spin set up pitstops and Justin Bonsignore got out first.  

On the Lap 92 restart Bonsignore got a huge jump and Timmy Solomito,  in the Flamingo #16, grabbed second; he then seized the lead and withstood a hard counterattack from Bonsignore on Lap 93.  Preece got to second following Jimmy Blewitt's second spin of the day, and at Lap 109 he wernt after the lead; Preece and Solomito raced for a lap before Preece cleared into first and it appeared the race was over - but on Lap 116 Solomito ran down Preece and retook the lead.   Bonsignore grabbed second on Lap 121 but Preece fought back and retook the spot, then closed on Solomito by Lap 130.

The challenge, though, would not develop, as Solomito edged away and by Lap 140 was over a second ahead, and kept inching away to the win, denying Preece the expected triumph.

It also gave Solomito a first - his first Mod Tour win.   "I feel like I'm dreaming," he summarized of his breakthrough win, while Preece was left summarizing that "my car didn't have the drive it had before" of his second-half effort.

Others likewise were left a little mystified by the changing track condition.   ""It was just a good top five,: said Doug Coby afterward.  "It's all you can hope for.   I thought, 'all right, I'll fish around (for another line).'"

Jimmy Blewitt, making his debut in Bob Garbarino's famed Mystic Missile #4, struggled even when his car wasn't going around.   "At first I was stuck tight," he said.  "I got free but it was still tight, like a four-wheel drift."

Bonsignore summarized that "The 16 was the class of the field."  Like others his #51 "was too tight." 

Playing it tight thus proved the order of the day in a 150-lapper where a first-timer stole the thunder of one of the Tour's stronger stars.

Spring Cleaning For Coby At Thompson

The name Icebreaker took on more than normal meaning in April 2015.   Thompson Speedway opened its season after a winter that dumped over 100 inches of snow - something that brought back memory of the infamous 1978 and '79 New England blizzards - and opened amid some of the best mid-April weather in years.  

Not only did the weather bring out positivity, it brought out the strongest crowd for the Icebreaker in awhile and also showcased some eye-popping changes to the speedway, eye-popping especially to one who hadn't been to Thompson in several years.   With a strong sponsorship presence from the Mohegan Sun casino, the speedway now boasts garage buildings in what had once been merely an open paved lot for team transporters; it also boasts a revamped road course, sporting new road course pavement, SAFER barriers, and old-fashioned Armco - so old-fashioned it made the road course look like Watkins Glen.  

The Icebreaker thus opened the NASCAR Modified Tour season with the strongest field for the 150-lapper in years.   But for two-time series champ Doug Coby, it was merely a showcase of spring cleaning.   Staring on the pole in his Smeriglio Racing #2 Chevrolet, Coby took off in a race that was an exercise in close but ultimately futile pursuit by the likes of Bobby Santos III, New England legend Ted Christopher, and contender Ronnie Silk.   Silk offered the only true challenge for Coby, as pitstops past halfway under yellow put Silk in the lead; it took three laps and a nifty three-abreast slide job by Coby on the restart before he retook the lead and finished up cleaning house at the Icebreaker.

Numerous yellows kept the field close; it also put the #88 of Woody Pitkat behind the eight ball early as NASCAR briefly stopped the race to find a mysterious fluid leak that drivers reported but could not identify; finding the #88 to be the culprit, NASCAR sent Pitkat to the pits to get the leak fixed.   This done, Pitkat had to rally back to the front and he did just that, ultimately finishing second.

"Every restart we started on the bottom," Pitkat said after the race, noting the long-standing reality of Thompson racing that the low line in the corners simply isn't fast.   It thus leads to Modified racing there resembling sprint cars with slide-job passing and the cars noticeably loose in the corners.  

Coby's housecleaning at Thompson furthers a Modified career that started well in 2004 but hit a series of detours in the 2008-10 period as Coby had to go car-hopping, an experience that "promoted me a lot to the series," he has said, which stood him in good stead once he finally got settled again, first with the Dave Darling team in 2011, later with the Smeriglio outfit.  

The top nine finishers were Chevrolets, including fifth-place  Ryan Preece in Ed Partridge's #6, one of the few cars that could give even a cursory challenge to Coby all day.   The Chevy monopoly was broken by Todd Szegedy, driving Bob Garbarino's #4 Dodge; it marled a comeback of sorts for Szegedy, who ran just six Tour races in 2014.  

The Icebreaker also marked the beginning of a new TV deal for NASCAR's smaller touring classes as NBC Sports Network taped the race for airing later in the week.    If the deal helps as some clearly hope it does, it will be a step forward for NASCAR given long-standing acrimony over negligence, real and perceived, toward the sanctioning body's smaller touring classes.  

For the Modified tour spring cleaning resumes at Stafford Speedway at the end of the month.

Takeaways From Talladega And Thompson

The third weekend of October was a boffo weekend for racing as Talladega opened up for the Truck Series and Winston Cup while Thompson Speedway brang down the curtain on its 2013 season and that of the Modified Tour. A scattershot look at both -


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Donny Lia, Rowan Pennick, and Ryan Preece give the Mod Tour a fresh new class of stars  - The final 20 or so laps of the Sunoco 150 were a spirited battle between Lia, Pennick, and Preece; Lia had won at Stafford a few weeks earlier while he and Todd Szegedy got into it in September at New Hampshire's FW Webb 100-miler with Ryan Newman.   Preece had won the most races and won the series title while Pennick had not led a lap since the Town Fair Tire 100 at Loudon in July.   The three of them got into it and Pennick took the win, his first since the 2010 Riverhead 200.

The three of them showcased youth and spirited competition that will serve Modified Racing well.



Johnny Sauter makes a nice living in NASCAR's high minors - Over the years there have been drivers who've never made it in Winston Cup but whose talent is showcased in NASCAR's "high minors" of the Busch Series and the Trucks.   The Truck 250 was one of the most amazing Talladega Truck races ever seen and Johnny Sauter's rally to the win - his ninth in the Truck Series - was as brilliant a battle as seen anywhere.  

Sauter reminds one of Todd Bodine, Mike Wallace, Ron Hornaday, and Randy LaJoie, drivers who tried a go of it in Cup and never made it, then established their own mini-kingdoms of success one level below Cup.   That's not a bad way to go in racing.



Jamie McMurray again defies assumptions - In 398 Cup starts McMurray now has seven wins.   He may never contend for a series title but he doesn't have to to have a memorable career.   It reintroduced the sport to a driver who hadn't won since his eye-opening 2010 season and who most had pretty much written off.



Aric Almirola again shows he is a disgrace - It may be fitting that Almirola was born in Tampa Bay, where the Bucs have degenerated into an embarrassment to the NFL.   Certainly his two seasons in Richard Petty's #43 have been a disgrace even with the surprising fifth at New Hampshire and five other top ten finishes.   Winning the Diehard 500's pole by rain-induced default, Almirola led eight laps and then was never heard from again, limping home 22nd after just riding around all day.  Petty deserves a lot better than that - winning Talladega is what Petty deserves, not the pseudo-effort Almirola phoned in.



Talladega again showcases the best of racing and the worst of NASCAR's rules ineptitude - The Truck 250 was another case where the supporting race to Cup was better than the Cup race.   NASCAR's Generation Six racecar has done poorly all season (necessitating early October's aerodynamics test at Charlotte) and Talladega showed it can produce great racing even with a bad rules package as the lead changed 52 times.   But even with that passing was graphically difficult since NASCAR's radiator rules discourage tandem drafting - the cars seemed even not to want to touch at all - and the points-racing ethos in the sport kicked in with drivers running in line the last ten laps waiting for a moment that didn't happen.


Contrast this with the Truck 250, where tandem drafting was prolific; the most striking part of the race, though, was how conventional drafting was able to keep pace and once a tandem took the lead the push-Truck would dive under and take the lead.   The negatives of the tandems in the past - the push-vehicle before would push a leader into the clear and just stay there; conventional drafts could not keep up - appear to be evolving away.    The Truck race didn't have the weird look that tandem races had had; it looked and felt like an old-fashioned superspeedway shootout.  

It's why Brian France and NASCAR need to stop opposing tandem drafting; it is the strongest power to pass the sport has ever seen.   Perhaps Gene Stefanyshyn, NASCAR's innovation director, can persuade the sanctioning body that the best innovations often are going back to the future.



Denny Hamlin wasn't the only one hoping his season ends soon  - Hamlin blew up and it was mentioned on the mediacast that he's looking forward to end a lost year.   Meanwhile Stewart-Haas Racing had a bad ending - Danica Patrick shockingly ran strong then disappeared in the final 30 laps, while Austin Dillon ran great all day then got spun out and then blasted viciously on the backstretch - a fitting image of the team's lost 2013 season.  



Yes, there was a Trevor Bayne sighting - Some compared him to Tim Tebow - fitting since Bayne's 2011 Daytona 500 win hasn't gotten any positive follow-up aside from two Busch Series wins.   Even with that he basically has disappeared since that Daytona win.  



NASCAR needs to rethink whether to have paved run-offs - Over and over vehicles have slid hard into the inside wall at Talladega and elsewhere and never have we seen any evidence to think paved run-offs are doing any good.


And with that NASCAR heads to Martinsville, though we're a little puzzled why it's been pushed to late October the last number of years.

From Texas To Thompson

As April thaws further out racing begins stepping up, and touring series under NASCAR sanction outside of the big three of Cup, Nationwide, and the Trucks start getting into gear. Such was the case a night after NASCAR's Texas 500, a race where a doltish Senator's demand that the race not be broadcast because of National Rifle Association sponsorship of it provided more fireworks than the racing itself - a controversy quickly lapped by bouts of "cheating by the Penske Fords before the race and then flunking of postrace inspection by runner-up Martin Truex. Keselowski in particular was angry, claiming the Penske Fords had been "targeted" by NASCAR. "We're not going to take it," he added.


The "cheating" by the Penske Fords supposedly involved beating NASCAR inspection to suppress rearend "skewing" that had become popular in 2012 by Jimmie Johnson but which now is disallowed by NASCAR; how they did it isn't clear though the story is they used a "floating" rearend.   Of course it's not a simple case of NASCAR politics or a team being brazen in its cheating, because in the heavily political and often murky world of NASCAR there's reason to believe both sides - politics in racing are as old as racing (see for just one example such cases as Junior Johnson's outsized engine at Charlotte in May 1991 and the following revealation of excessive fuel storage in his Ford at the same track in October 1991) and so is cheating - and to use an old Sam Moses line, cheating, or as Bill Gazaway would put it, fudging, or as Richard Petty put it, just trying to get an edge.  


There of course is the reality of the raceteams being ahead of the inspectors in the technology arms race, which makes things murkier - how long have the Penske guys been able to get away with rearend skew before getting caught?  And chances are other teams will slip something past NASCAR inspectors, and when the racing is genuinely good then "cheating" issues tend to alleviate themselves.  


This certainly was the case at Thompson Speedway's Icebreaker the afternoon following the Texas 500.   The Whelen Modified Tour was the primary feature but multiple racecar classes strutted their stuff, with two great battles in particular standing out - the limited sportsman feature was decided in a terrific five-lap shootout won by Larry Barnett, who raced nose to nose with Jesse Gleason - Gleason and Barnett drove mid-80s Monte Carlos, but Gleason's car sported a 1988 Buick nosepiece, a charming hybrid surpassed only by Seekonk's Late Models where several have 1990s Monte Carlo noses but latter-80s Monte Carlo bubble-glass bodies - with Gleason killing Barnett high in One and Two - sporting a somewhat pronounced dip in the middle - but Barnett beating everyone alive on the backstrtech.  


The second thriller was the SK-class Modified shootout.   Keith Rocco, Woody Pitkat, and Kerry Malone got into an exciting battle for the win in the final ten laps and there were some three lead changes involving crossover passing - except Pitkat's last crossover crossed him out of contention off Two with three to go.  


Not that the Modified Tour race was any slouch.   Numerous cautions flew thanks to a rough day for Gary McDonald, but the worst yellow came near halfway of the 150-lapper thanks to a nasty crash in One involving Ron Yuhas - unsung hero of New Hampshire International Speedway in 2006 - and Ron Fuller, a crash necessitating a red flag.


Lap 111 saw another yellow and Mike Stefanik - the polesitter who got knocked out of the top six on the opening lap - got tires while Rowan Pennick and Chuck Hossfeld gambled on tires and stayed out.   Several late yellows helped Stefanik close up on Pennick, and the final restart with 11 to go was decisive as Pennick surprisingly lost the lead despite starting on the outside row - the preferred line for most of the day.   Even with losing the lead Stefanik's new tires didn't allow him to get away from Pennick, as Mike won by only a couple of lengths.


Curiously, Stefanik was self-depricating in victory lane about the whole thing as he posted the win with a new team.

Before the race Justin Bonsignore stated the Hoosier Tires the Tour runs, "They'll last at least eighty-five or ninty laps if we have to....here at Thompson you probably want new tires."   It certainly proved the case, and also showed "there's a lot of good quality cars (in the Modified Tour).....There's still ten to fifteen cars that can win every week."  


The Tour has often been seen as the red-headed stepchild in the NASCAR scheme of things, and "the cost of racing has gone up, but the cost of everything has gone up," says Bonsignore.   "I think it's a little out of hand now.   If they make big changes to try and cut costs, it's going to cost us more up front again.   It might save you money in the long run."


One such area is spec motors, which seem to be creeping into the Tour, though there also seems to be a diversity of engine builders/suppliers still.   Billy The Kid engines and Bob Bruneau, long-time engine figures on the Tour, are still common in the garage area, and some Tour cars run Rahmoc engines - yes, the company that once upon a time fielded super-strong Pontiacs for Neil Bonnett and Morgan Shepherd.    A Grand National Series branded spec motor built by Roush-Yates is also to be found in the Mod Tour garage area.  


The cost issue plagues racing at all levels, but in the end exciting finishes such as seen at Thompson's Icebreaker make the hassles all worth it.