RICK @ the RACES ( 3 / 4 Nov 2012)
4 Nov Autodrome St Eustache (Que)
The first weekend in November means one thing for us dirt racing fans, it’s the annual DIRT TRACK WORLD FINALS in Charlotte, North Carolina. For the past two years I’ve been fortunate enough to attend, but for this year I had to give it a miss.
My daughter Carla, who lives in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, is expecting my first grandchild in 6 weeks time, and I’m presently making plans for a Christmas time visit. This basically meant , I simply didn’t have enough spare vacation leave from work, to head off to Charlotte.
The good thing about the DIRT TRACK WORLD FINALS, is that it’s televised ‘almost live’ by SPEED TV .( I say ‘almost live’ because, although it’s being transmitted the same night, there is quite a bit of time delay)
So, with nothing else on my agenda, the couch in my living room was my racing base for Saturday night. With snacks and good bottle of red wine by my side, I was ready at 8-00 pm for the action. The PC was also set up to receive updates and pics ( during the commercials) from my Media friends who were down there.
Thankfully I never checked my PC until after the big Modified race, so I had no idea that Brett Hearn would be the winner. That was a great race !
Messages about Dale Blaney’s win in the Sprint Car race and Jimmy Owens in the Late Models, were on Face Book, before seeing it on TV, but it still didn’t spoil it too much. The TV coverage which lasted for about 5 hours , was excellent and I was surprisingly pleased to see that the Modifieds got a good proportion of the ‘air time’ .
At the end of the night all three of the 2012 Champions were crowned.
Donny Schatz (WoO Sprint Cars) Darrell Lanigan (WoO Late Models)
andMatt Sheppard (DIRTCAR Big Block Modifieds) . All these guys have raced at my local track, The Cornwall Motor Speedway , in recent times.
I must thank two media friends in particular, Rhonda Beck and Chris Dolack for uploading and allowing me to use some of their great pics from Charlotte.
Needless to say, I was late getting to bed that night, but was up early on Sunday morning for a trip to the paved Autodrome St Eustache in Quebec where they were holding their end of season ENDURO.
I’m not normally a big fan of ENDURO’s ( and usually avoid them like the plague!) but with nothing else to do locally, I needed my ‘fix’.
Actually this turned out to be one of the better ENDURO’s I’ve witnessed with around 96 cars taking part on the dry asphalt. The dirt tack ENDURO’s I’ve seen in the past have been slow crawls around a muddy oval, but on a paved track, it’s more like a ‘real race’. It was a chilly day so after watching a couple of hours of the action, I returned to Cornwall , Ontario and the warmth of my home.