POSTED SEPTEMBER 21 , 2003

DAVE LOGAN won his 2^nd Street Stock feature of the season Sunday night at the Mottville Speedway as he took the 15 lapper over Larry Saunders, Tracy Pineau, Ron Coburn and John Wenger. Results were the same in the heat.

Merle Yoder won his 16^th Mini Stock feature of the season as he took the 15 lapper over Jay Howard, Eric Root and Glenna Sargent. Howard and Root waged a tremendous battle for 2^nd with Howard taking 2^nd place by about one foot! In the heat it was Howard over Yoder and Root.

Larry Saunders and Tony Eldridge each won separate 15 lap Mini Thunder Car features. Eldridge won the first one over Root, Saunders, Ryan Pineau, Kelsey Saunders, Tony Vitali and Mike Guthrie. In the 2^nd feature it was Saunders in a great battle with Root who settled for 2^nd. Vitali was 3^rd followed by Guthrie, Pineau and Kelsey Saunders.

Regular Saturday and Sunday night racing continues at Mottville through the end of November!

Interesting point to the MTC for the night and week-end. First of all Sunday night Saunders was driving Root’s car and Root was driving Richard Allbee’s car! So Eric was beaten by his own car!  We had two different reports on why Allbee was gone, one report said he had the flu and the other report said he was chained to his computer!

Another oddity of the MTC for the week-end was only one of the top 6 drivers in the season point standings raced! And that one, number 5 in the standings, only raced one night! Root climbed to 8^th in the standings and Eldridge 9^th.

Coburn and Wegner returned for the first time this season but by prior agreement were not paid and did not receive points as they were running tires which were much softer than our rule allows. Although I encouraged both of them to go to radial tires they insist they want to go with the Good Years for next week! They also told me Jerry Benson may be running his SS next week-end!

I knew it was nice to have 5 SS again! I am convinced that we will never get bigger crowds until we get a decent size field of street stocks as MS simply will not draw a crowd, that has been proved over and over to us!

We will start running radial tire SS in separate heats and features as soon as we get 3 of them! That may well be next Saturday! I am convinced the long term way to go is with radial tires because it will cut the cost of racing by at least half for the drivers! My feeling is if you are 3200 lbs and on radial tires what else you have for equipment is probably not real important!

Anyway what follows is what Coburn and Wegner told me. I am adding nothing to it at all and if you want more details you need to talk to Ron or John who told me all that follows in front of Tom Pearson, so I have a witness and I am not making any of this up!

Here goes, Ron was the season points leader at another track and last night was season championship night for his class. Back in June, Ron says, the owner announced that points had been checked and were correct to that point. But Saturday night Ron was summoned to a meeting and told that there had been a mistake in the points and the 2^nd place driver had not been credited for points one night. That driver was now the points leader and no matter what Ron did last night he could not win the season points championship! So he loaded and left. He then tells me he was “bad mouthed” on the radio station that broadcasts the track races for not being a good sport!

I know this sounds truly far out but the above is reported just as Ron and John told me! In my more than 50 years of being involved in racing I have never, ever heard of such a thing!

Another interesting story from a totally different person! Seems this one driver took a MS to two different tracks Saturday for specials and made a grand total of $90 from both tracks! But when I total up the pit passes for the two Saturdays at one track and one Saturday at the other plus the entry fee at the one track I come up with $100! This car often wins at Mottville and may well have made $200 for two days instead of $90 and he would have invested only $50 in pit passes!

Coming to Mottville Saturday I passed several cars heading to one track for this big special. I can tell you that these cars did not have a prayer, not a single prayer, of possibly winning! But they made their donation to the track!

Most of the big specials in our area are now over and the St Joseph County fair is now over so we move on! Car count should begin to really improve for the next few weeks! I am really excited about getting our SS class finally moving and hopefully starting something that can carry over to next season! Our biggest success story of 2003 is the MTC class! Not only are we getting 7-10 cars per night but we have about 20 cars actively running now and more being built plus more looking for cars! Now if we get the SS class going and get them on tires that are affordable for all, radials, which you can actually get for less than half price of track tires and sometimes get used ones for the asking, we should be all set for 2004!

It sure was great having Dave Logan, Ron Coburn and John Wegner back for the first time this season!

The only bad news I have to report is that Jerry Benson told me the Mini Cup cars will not be coming this coming Saturday as 3 of their drivers work for the power company and been called east to restore power after the hurricane! Hopefully we can get them a couple times in October!

Belated Happy Birthday to Glenna Sargent, who most certainly will be our MS Rookie of the Year!