2012 Race Report 1

Indiana & Michigan January 7 & 8, 2012

Friday it was time to plan a short trip to get the racing year started with a couple of new tracks. There were some rescheduled enduros but at tracks that I have seen before so I decided to try a little further trip and left at dinner time Friday night to start the drive. I arrived at the Indiana welcome center about midnight and stopped for the night. Saturday morning I drove to southern Indiana and arrived in Princeton just before noon for a stop at the Gibson County Fair Pavilion where they were starting their winter series on an unusually warm sunny day. Although the races are indoors the Pavilion is not heated (the attached building did have warm restrooms and a concession stand) and they need to partially open the doors to ventilate the building so the warm weather was a great benefit. The 1/10-mile dirt track was flat and quite wide and was watered enough to keep the dust down. There are no poles of any kind in the nice open building so visibility from any of the four sets of six row bleachers was good. They had big concrete Jersey barriers for outside walls with wheel fencing and hay bales in front of the concrete in the turns. The inside of the track is marked with metal discs. The only obstruction in the infield was the flag stand and scoring platform at the starting line. The lights were good and the lady announcer kept us well informed over the speakers that were inside as well as outside. Warm ups for the 70 karts started at 11:30AM with racing getting under way at 1PM with two sets of heats before the features for the 9 classes. They drew 9 senior and 3 junior champs as the only caged kart classes. Mike Jesse won the first senior champ heat from third in a non-stop race then finished second to D J Ott in the second heat to earn the pole position for the feature. It took five starts to complete the first lap of the feature then the race went non-stop with Jesse the winner over Ott and Ira McGill. Jesse also picked up 2 more wins with a victory in both the medium and heavy divisions of the flat karts. The racing was completed at 5:30PM with Zach Wheeler taking the win in the RWYB class of 8 karts and I was on the road north. Sunday morning I finished driving north to stop in Hale Michigan where the weekend Winter Fest was already in full swing. Today the entertainment would include the Bump N Run races at noon put on by Unique Motorsports at the Iosco County Fairgrounds on the north side of town. I arrived just before noon and the high clouds were clearing for a sunny afternoon with a breeze blowing out of the south. Parking at the fairgrounds was no problem as there was no snow on the ground but the ground was frozen giving you a firm and nearly dry parking lot. A nice crowd had filled in the center 1/3 of the 15-row aluminum bleachers and I ran into Mike and Guy before I entered. They have some lights that would not be needed today and there were some excellent temporary speakers set up in front of the stands. They drew good car counts with 13 big rear wheel drive cars and 26 small front wheel drive cars. There was a concrete wall and fence in front of the stands and they placed concrete slabs around the outside of the south turns and down the backstretch but had a large open grass area before the fencing on the north side. The dirt track was set up as an oval with the light pole surrounded by a series of the concrete slabs and some big tires marking the inside of the north end and just one big implement tire marking the inside of the south turn. The track was flat with a few natural bumps and frozen but the sun was melting the top quarter inch of wet dirt and the track soon became very muddy and slick – no dust today! They started racing about 20 minutes late with 3 small car heats that transferred the top 3 to the feature then a consi that put the winner in the feature field too. The big cars ran two heats with the top 5 going to the feature. The consi had a couple of red flags as first a couple of cars pushed one car up and over the concrete to the outside light pole and later a car caught fire. Eric Short won the consi from 5^th and tagged the rear of the feature that was immediately following. They had a red flag early in the feature to put the tire back at the south end and they pushed it further inside and made a wider turn that helped the racing too. Shawn Fettes started 5^th and won over Joe Smith and Gary Collins as the three traded the lead during the entire feature. The big cars closed out the day (that had now become overcast and the 30 degrees felt much cooler) with a non-stop race that Eric Anderson won, but he didn’t, because be spun to a stop a foot before crossing the finish line and the trophy was awarded to Scott Rezler who drove across the line as Anderson was stopped. The racing was done at 2:40PM and I was on my way home.