POSTED MARCH 11, 2025

Another cold night of racing at Mottville Saturday night but we got night number 2 in no problem! We are now two nights ahead of where we were a year ago as we opened the 3^rd Saturday of March in 2000!

We had a lot of scratches Saturday night which is most frustrating for all involved but nothing you can do about it! Scott Baker sure has a beautiful street stock, now if he can just get it to run! Josh Salter showed up with a beautiful yellow Mottville Stock that once belong to Galesburg ace Josh Carr and Josh Salter looked awesome in it. He had many people talking about a match-up with Robert Teadt, Jr. whenever Bob finally shows! Would be a good race that’s for sure!

Larry Birk brought his MS 97 for the first time and did fairly well, 4^th in feature. Jean Behlke had some trouble with her MS 80 as it would stop and then speed up and stop again! Finally quit for good in feature and she had times she was looking really fast! Now its up to hubby Tod to get it fixed this week! Randy Morley tried to get the MS truck fixed, the one he rolled end over end last week, but could not do it . However he assures us he will have it running again next Saturday! Merle Yoder sounds like he might finally get serious about Mottville and run full time in 2001! He has the points lead and certainly could end up being season points champion if he sets his mind to it! Strong 2^nd place finish Saturday night to go with his opening night win. If the rumor mill is correct Salter is heading for Galesburg once it opens so Merle will not have to contend with him! The rookies, Terry Miller and Jason Schaefer, spun twice each in the feature and 3^rd time and your are out but they managed to avoid that! I have the feeling that these two will get things under control soon and be factors!

Dave Wilbur had the Bomber 3 really humming! Won the heat and feature quite easily! Would have loved to have seen how Bill Crapo would have done but next week will find out! This time Randy Morley had no problems in the street stock 26 and won his first feature of the season with many, many more to follow I am sure! Got to believe, however, that Jesse Van Avery can get more speed out of the SS 38!

Terry Kline and Rod Roberts raced side by side in both the heat and feature and these two cars and drivers and really most evenly matched! Appears whoever starts on the tail will finish 2^nd!

Kart racing was really good again! Very close racing and the Brown-Forsyth racing team really has some terrific looking karts! We had 3 different winners in dash, heat and feature!

Had a lot of people Saturday night telling me their cars were just about done! Wade Owens told me Dick Groves was waiting for warmer weather! That may well be the case with Ryan Prough who registered his SS 22 this week but was a no show. Tom Pierson says Ryan does not like cold weather!

Received a lot of emails this week and some compliments on our web site! David Schaefer and myself are always open to suggestions for additions and improvements!

We did get the water turned on in pits Thursday evening and that really helped! Much easier to keep the pipes from freezing in the pits than in the front. We have 3 stools and 2 urinals in pits but front has about 6 urinals and perhaps 14 stools and would be nightmare to keep from freezing if the temp gets much below 25! So right now I would say it will be March 31 before we turn the water on in front!

We do hope to get the stone that is in piles from snow plowing for Mottville Madness spread out soon. Tom Pierson worked on it Saturday afternoon but some of the piles are still frozen and can not be moved!  Once we get the stone spread out we will see if need to get another load of stone for the driveway! Also waiting on estimate for putting concrete where we took out a section of bleachers in front of the main concession stand. This will make a very nice lawn chair area and a mud hole if we do not get it paved soon!

Still waiting on two Mini-Thunder cars to show so we can start racing them! In starting a new class you are always caught in this “catch 22” ! No one wants to come until you have the cars and you can’t get the cars until someone comes with them! But we are ready to race Mini-Thunder cars as soon as we have 2 of them or more and will pay $60 to win the feature when we have 2 or more. The worse thing that could happen if you brought a MTC and no one else did is that you would run MS and get some practice! It took several weeks to get the TC class started last season so it may be a week or two more until we get the MTC started!

On a closing note I talked with a local RV executive recently about the economy and he told me that many of the smaller RV firms may well be in a better position to survive than the larger ones during this slow down in the economy. I think that may well apply to racing and one day before long I am going to write an extra column and give you the math on speedways and why big is certainly not always better!