Deer Creek Speedway
Deer Creek carnage sours Gopher 50 moods
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
A look at the carnage. (tylerrinkenphoto.smugmug.com)
SPRING VALLEY, Minn. (July 4) — Nick Hoffman won Friday’s 30-lap NAPA Gopher 50 preliminary feature at Deer Creek Speedway, but he found it difficult to even crack a smile when he emerged from his car for the postrace ceremonies. The circumstances surrounding his $10,000 World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series triumph put the 33-year-old driver from Mooresville, N.C., in a foul mood. | RaceWire
After assuming the lead on a lap-two restart with a slider on Tyler Bruening that resulted in the Decorah, Iowa, driver spinning at the exit of turn four to set off a massive multi-car accident, Hoffman just wanted the interviews, picture-taking — and the night — to end.
“That’s the worst I’ve felt in victory lane,” Hoffman said standing sullenly alongside his Tye Twarog-owned Longhorn Chassis outside the WoO operations trailer in the pit area during technical inspection. “Like, I’ve never got out of the car and just not celebrated. I didn’t want my kids on the roof, nothing like that, you know. I’ve never been in that situation before. It definitely sucks.”
Hoffman gathered himself following the incident to lead the remainder of the distance while turning back threats from Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., who spun out of second place in a tangle with a lapped car on lap 22, and eventual runner-up Ryan Gustin of Marshalltown, Iowa, but he fully understood he was at the center of a whirlwind thanks to his controversial move on Bruening.
The crash that eliminated or sent to the rear every driver running among the top-nine spots except Hoffman — including WoO points leader Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., who rolled onto his car’s side in the middle of the mayhem — was pinned on Hoffman by most participants and observers whether he agreed with the assessment or not.
“When I watched a replay there sitting on the back straight (during the red flag), I felt like it was just as much his fault as it was mine,” said Hoffman, who was able to view video of his scrape with Bruening on the Jumbotron positioned beyond the backstretch wall. “But trying to plead that case is going to be a whole different situation.”
Indeed, Bruening, 39, blamed Hoffman for knocking him from a race that he led for the first two laps off the pole position.
“He’s a good enough driver to know what he did there,” Bruening said while sitting on a folding chair in his Skyline Motorsports trailer after the feature. “I mean, we’re two laps into the race … he just made a bonehead move, you know?”
Hoffman conceded that “we were early in the race” when asked to review his initial scrape with Bruening, but he noted that it was “only a 30-lap race so you kind of got to be aggressive.” So when he saw an opportunity to grab the lead from Bruening following the lap-two restart, he went for it.
“He opened his entry to (turn) three pretty wide and I had a big run off of two — he kind of wheel-spun off of two — so I just bombed it in there to slide him,” Hoffman said. “I felt like it was a really late slide. Like, it wasn’t a short slide or anything. It was, like, I committed from entry all the way across, and I didn’t plan on leaving him a lane. I figured he would have lifted and crossed me (off turn four), and he just never lifted to cross.
“And he was pretty crooked anyway in the center of the corner, so, you know, as soon as my right-rear touches his left-front or whatever, it stops his left-front and just spins him around in front of everybody.”
Bruening lost control of his car when Hoffman drifted in front of him rounding turn four, sending the leader sideways down the track. He was immediately hit by the fourth-running Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., and the “carnage,” as Chad Simpson of Mount Vernon, Iowa, one of the involved drivers, said, began. The third-running Pierce’s car was tossed over amid a pileup that also included Ethan Dotson, Jake O’Neil, Dustin Sorensen, Aaron Marrant and Tristan Chamberlain with several others marginally involved, but no injuries were reported.
“From my angle in the seat, I didn’t see anything until I just saw (Bruening) and T-Mac were like turning sideways right in front of me,” said Pierce, the Thursday preliminary feature winner who walked to the ambulance for a precautionary checkup after emerging from his wrecked car that he didn’t believe sustained any serious frame damage. “It was just a chain reaction once Hoffman and Bruening made the contact, which by the replay, it looks like Bruening spun out because (McCreadie) was on top of his radiator.
“That was between them two guys. I don’t really know what happened, but all I know is (Bruening) was sideways, and then as he was coming down the hill, it was like chain reaction, bam, bam, bam. McCreadie hit him, and then I did. I thought I had gotten hit by more cars, but I guess it was T-Mac was coming down and then I launched off his nose, launched into the air, and I came down and Simpson came and hit me and rolled me over, and then I ended up on my left side.”
McCreadie said he “didn’t see (Bruening) even spinning because Bobby and I got together on the backstretch and I was more focused on making sure that I could make the corner, so I was kind of looking left. I wasn’t really looking way up on the track there, and honestly, I couldn’t even tell until all of a sudden (Bruening) was there. I seen him out of the corner of my eye, not, like, staying up and spinning.”
“I hit him right square in the door, and that turned me around and I think Bobby went over my hood first,” added McCreadie, whose Briggs Transport team had his Longhorn Chassis stripped of virtually all its bodywork in the pit area afterward and was working to fix a damaged front suspension, radiator and various other maladies.
Hoffman quickly learned that a mass of twisted metal was left in his wake.
“As soon as I was going down the front straightaway (the race director on the one-way radio) said, ‘Caution,’ so I kind of expected that (Bruening) had lost it one way or the other,” Hoffman said. “Then I roll around and I just feel like an asshole because everybody else is tore up, you know? It’s one thing if I just slide that guy and he crashes and nobody else does, but when you get, obviously, 10 more cars or whatever involved, it definitely makes you feel bad about it.”
Bruening felt there was no excuse for Hoffman’s aggressiveness.
“I mean, he jumped the start. They let it go,” Bruening said. “And then he just banzaied it into three, knew he wasn’t clear and just, you know, slid up in front of me. We all know what we’re doing when we throw sliders, and if we’re going to clear or not, and half the sliders these guys throw, they’re never clear. They just expect the guy that they’re sliding to move or stop, or hit the brakes.
“I didn’t even see him until it was too late. When you’re running that top, you’re in the fuel and you just can’t lift and stop. It takes you to the wall, or 10 cars will go by you.
“My whole nose was probably up into his rear end cover,” he continued. “I dug my front end into him and spun my back end around and, you know, you’re in the front of the field and here comes everybody. You do the old cross-your-arms-and-get-ready-to-get-clobbered kind of thing.”
Bruening absorbed several high-speed hits, most notably one just in front of his left-side door from McCreadie, but wasn’t injured. He was able to eventually drive away from the scene but couldn’t continue because his left-side engine headers was crushed, the most significant damage his Infinity Race Car sustained.
“It’s just really frustrating,” said Bruening, whose team packed up and left the track Friday to make repairs at their shop — about an hour away — with plans to return to the track for Saturday’s scheduled $50,000-to-win finale (he was locked into the first dash to determine the top eight starting spots in the 75-lap headliner that was rained out and not rescheduled). “We had a good night. The car was freaking awesome out front. I felt really good. I was a little nervous about getting out and leading (at the start) and I knew the track was going to change a bunch, but you don’t get many opportunities like that, and it makes it that much worse when somebody makes a bonehead move.”
Hoffman said he was confronted by Bruening at the scales in the pit area immediately after the race’s checkered flag. “He threw a water bottle at me, threw it in the cockpit, and then just like slapped me on the head or whatever,” Hoffman related. But there was no further physical or verbal altercations between the two.
“Just trying to set a good example for my children that are here,” said Bruening, who admitted that he was understandably angry by a demise that he felt robbed him of a golden opportunity for his elusive first-ever WoO victory. “It’s a racing thing that shouldn’t have happened. I mean, if he was decent about it, he’d come over and say something but he won’t, because he just won’t. And it’s unfortunate. But we’ll be back at it tomorrow.”
Hoffman remarked that he had “calm down” before continuing the race, but he managed to run the remaining 28 circuits in front for his fourth WoO checkered flag of the season. Shirley drew close to him midway through the feature and Gustin loomed large after overtaking Jake Timm of Winona, Minn., on the lap-22 restart following Shirley’s spin, but he hung on to beat Gustin by 0.782 of a second.
“I was obviously frustrated with the whole situation, and I knew I had a good enough car to win,” Hoffman said. “Then we go back green and I knew that top would eventually get rolling. I could watch that (video) board down the back straightaway and see that (Shirley) was starting to make gains up there, so I just moved up and noticed that it was way more grip up there, and I was able to carry a lot more speed.
“So then it was just a situation of trying to maneuver lapped cars and not crash any of them. I hung myself dry a couple times trying to pass Tristan Chamberlain, so I felt like that was when Shirley could have slid me or got by me there. I finally cleared Tristan, and I think Shirley was the one that drove into his left side. Then once I get clean race again, I know I’m not going to get back to lapped traffic so I could just hustle around there.”
Outrunning Gustin in the final laps allowed Hoffman to gain redemption from a last-lap loss to the Hawkeye State driver in last year’s first Gopher 50 preliminary feature, but it was still little solace to a driver who couldn’t get over his involvement in a race-changing incident.
“And like I said, I’m just pissed off that, you know, all the other guys that got crashed and involved in it more than anything,” said Hoffman, who had been scheduled compete with Bruening in Saturday’s Dash for the top eight points earners.
