Kevin Kovac's Take Five
Take Five: Not first rodeo for grading Richards
In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):
No. 1: When a photo of Rocket Chassis co-owner Mark Richards piloting a grader around Mansfield (Ohio) Speedway hit social media on Saturday, former DirtonDirt full-timer Derek Kessinger texted and reminded me of another time that Richards helped a racetrack with some surface work. I recalled that day over a decade ago. I was there to witness it. It was July 8, 2013, a Monday night World of Outlaws Late Model Series show at Black Hills Speedway in Rapid City, S.D. Showers hit the track around 5:30 p.m. to delay the program; after the surface proved to still be too sloppy when hot laps were attempted around 9 p.m., Richards agreed to climb into the track’s grader to employ his experience with track prep — he co-promoted Interstate 79 Speedway in Shinnston, W.Va., from 1988-2003 — in an attempt to salvage a night of racing. But not long into Richards’s track work, the grader ran out of fuel, leaving him sitting in turn three. A strong thunderstorm then deluged the track before the machine could be filled up with gas, forcing the cancellation of the card. Richards had better luck at Mansfield, putting in about four hours on the grader after Friday’s action and another similar length of time starting Saturday morning and helping whip up an improved surface for Saturday’s big-money WoO finale.
No. 2: Thinking back to that 2013 WoO event at Black Hills Speedway — I was in attendance as the tour’s public relations director — triggered more memories of what was one of my strangest nights ever at a racetrack. For starters, many people on hand thought the track surface was good enough for the Outlaws to race on it when hot laps were attempted, but a local racer who went on the track and promptly drove into the turn-one wall showed that it was indeed still wet. Then after the late thunderstorm drenched the place and washed out the show, the skies cleared shortly thereafter and some fans hung around in the stands as everyone parked in the infield pit area was effectively stuck in place because haulers couldn’t drive across the saturated surface to exit through the turn-four gate (as shown by one local team that ended up jack-knifing their hauler in the fourth-turn opening when they tried to leave). After everyone became antsy about being unable to depart the track, New Yorker Tim Fuller, who was a WoO regular at the time, commandeered the rental car in which series director Tim Christman and I were traveling and basically turned it into a packer vehicle, driving it up-and-down the track at the turn-four gate in an effort to carve in a lane that was dry enough for haulers to cross the speedway. Finally, probably sometime around 2 a.m., then WoO regular Bub McCool volunteered to make an exit attempt; he got a running start with his hauler and managed to get across the track, leading to a mass exodus of the remaining teams.
No. 3: Postscript to that night at Black Hills: after Fuller made so many runs across the track with our rental — probably more than 50 — the car was absolutely caked with mud. The next day, when Christman and I made the drive over to the next WoO event at Wyoming’s Gillette Thunder Speedway, chunks of mud were dropping off the car pretty much the entire way. And then the day after that, when we began the long trip to Red River Co-op Speedway in Winnipeg, Manitoba, we were still leaving a trail of mud clods behind us for hundreds of miles. We finally stopped at a car wash to spray the undercarriage and left a substantial pile of Black Hills mud in the wash bay.
No. 4: Trent Ivey of Union, S.C., is entering this week’s Dream activities at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, in a brand-new Train Chassis, the fledgling brand produced by racer Benji Cole of Canon, Ga. The 31-year-old Ivey has been driving a Train machine this season for Sumter, S.C.-based Ridgeway Motorsports and Cole has built the team an updated version — a Train Chassis Elite — for Eldora. This week will mark Ivey’s eighth attempt to qualify for the Dream; he’s made the finale once, finishing 16th in 2024. Cole is excited to realize his dream of taking a car he built to Eldora for the first time. “With a lot of hard work and sacrifice we have one loaded up and ready,” Cole said of the car, which will carry a new engine constructed by Vic Hill.
No. 5: Here’s an obscure but neat statistical fact that Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series director Joshua Joiner passed along following his younger brother Joseph swept the weekend’s Northern Allstars Late Model Series doubleheader at Indiana’s Bloomington and Brownstown speedways. Someone told Joiner that Joseph was the 20th driver who’s won a feature on both the Northern Allstars and Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series circuits during their long (though unaffiliated) runs as regional tours, but Joiner is the only driver who has captured back-to-back races on both series. Joiner also became the first driver from Florida to win with the Northern Allstars, which operated from 1998-2012 before James Essex resurrected it in 2023 for its current stint. (The Southern All Star tour has run uninterrupted since 1983.)
