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On Saturday May 27, 2006 I went to Waterford Speedbowl in Eastern Connecticut for the first time. The main reason for the trip was to see the ISMA supermodified tour. If you never seen a supermodified race, you really need to go if you like racing at all. The supers are the fastest short track car anywhere and put on one heck of a show. The Waterford Speedbowl was my 144′th track I’ve seen a race at. The drive to Waterford was OK despite it being a bust Memorial Day weekend. We did hit some traffic on I-95 in Connecticut, but we were able to get around it. When we showed up at the track, we found a scarcely populated grandstand and found some top row seats to watch practice from. The practice showed us that th e track would be really racy, – however a shower came and we headed for cover. Luckily, despite the clouds looking pretty bad, the storm passed through really quickly and didn’t come back.

By the time the advertised starting time for the nights qualifying races (5:00 PM) arrived the stands were starting to get pretty full. Waterford does a number of things that I wish more short tracks would do. The first thing was that they advertised both a starting time for qualifying, and one for features. This is good because if you are busy during the day, you may not be able to make it in time for qualifying, but you may be able to make it for the features (if you knew when they were supposed to start). I noticed a good number of people coming in the track just before feature starting time (7:00 PM) and I expect the same would be true of other tracks that followed this method. Another thing that should not really be amazing that the officials did, is they actually starting at the time they advertised. This was true of both the qualifying and the feature races. By the time the feature races start, the track was retty much packed – not quite standing room only, but still a huge crowd on hand. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, May 20, 2006 I made a trip to the Orange County Fair Speedway in Middletown, New York. Although Orange County is only a 2 hour drive from my house and is not a new track for me, it felt like going there because I haven’t been there in almost 15 years. I used to go to the track a lot about 1989 thru 1991 or 1992, but I stopped go there a longtime ago. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the track that much (although it isn’t my favorite), but it just never seemed to be in my plans. Another reason is sometime back in the early 1990’s they stopped letting the top drivers like Brett Hearn and Danny Johnosn (neither of whom I am fans of, BTW) run in both the big block modified and 358 modified divisions [1]. After I arrived at the track and paid my $15 admission I noticed that almost nothing has changed. I don’t think they even put a coat of paint on the place! Although a fresh coat of paint and a few other changes may have been nice, I’m happy to report that some good things haven’t changed as well. First, they still have excellent French Fries and second, unlike many tracks, they don’t waste needless time between heat races. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that I’ve made it to two of the most historic race tracks in the country (and knocked them off my hit list) I’ve decided to come up with
the top 10 new-to-me race tracks in the USA I want to get too. Some are because they are historic, some are because I heard good things about
them, and some are because they may close down on me before I get there . Anyway, here they are (in ABC order):

Batesville (AR)
Bull’s Gap (TN)
Devil’s Bowl (TX)
Georgetown (DE)
Jennerstown (PA)
Lernerville (PA)
Little Valley (NY)
Lucas Oil Speedway (MO)
Skagit (WA)
Thunder Road (VT)

On the Saturday night of May 13′th I went to see the NASCAR Nextel Cup race at Darlington Speedway in Darlington, South Carolina. This was my first race ever at the historic super-speedway. In fact, it was my first race ever in the state of South Carolina (Another state crossed off my list!). The parents of the person I went to have a house in North Carolina that we stayed at. It was about a 2.5 hour ride from his parents house to Darlington. The traffic near the track was slow, but moving. Just before we pulled into the track, two people in a pick up truck in the lane towards our left pulled alongside us and commented on our New Jersey license plate. Seems that they grew up in NJ and were now living in North Carolina. A little more conversation lead us to find out that they grew up in East Brunswick – which borders the town I grew up in. Talk about a small world! Actually running into people from New Jersey isn’t all that hard. I seem to manage to do it almost everywhere I go. But the fact that they grew up in the next town is interesting and since they appeared to be about the same age as us, I wouldn’t be surprised if we drank a few beers at a local watering hole at the same time before. Read the rest of this entry »

I just saw an announcement from PALINET that John Iliff passed away this past weekend. John was PALINET’s Library Technology Development Consultant. Many of the people that are reading this on planet code4lib may have met John at the code4lib conference or elsewhere. John was always enthusiastic about Social Software and new technologies for libraries and will surely be missed.

On Sunday, April 23 I went to the historic Winchester Speedway in Winchester Indiana. This was my first time at the track. It is a high banked 1/2 mile asphalt track and is one of the oldest automobile race tracks in the world. Winchester has been on my hit list ever since I started to travel to race tracks but for some reason it has eluded me — until now.

On the schedule was the Rich Volger classic – a 30 lap race for the USAC sprinters, a 100 lap CRA Super Series race (late models) and a 40 lap CRA Street Stock race. I pulled into the track about 11:00 AM and found out they were already practicing. USAC qualifying started just about on time (12 noon) and was followed by qualifying by the late models and street stocks. Racing was to start at 2:00 PM and it started just about on time as well. There was heat races for the sprint cars and street stocks, followed by the USAC sprint race, the CRA Super Series race, and finally the street stocks. Overall the racing was very good – esp the sprint car race. 16-year-old Bryan Clauson won the USAC race to became the youngest winner ever in a USAC sprint car race. He was already the youngest winner ever in a USAC midget race. He was followed by Darren Hagen and a hard charging Dave Steele. If the race was 40 laps, I’m pretty sure Dave Steele would have won. I really don’t know how someone with Dave’s success on asphalt doesn’t at least have a NASCAR truck series ride as he is an excellent driver on the pavement and always a pleasure to watch race through the field.

Veteran racer Jeff Lane won the CRA Super Series race from the pole, but there was pretty good action behind him and the 100 lap race was enjoyable on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I didn’t stay for the street stock race as I still had to drive home to New Jersey. I really enjoyed my visit to Winchester and hope to get there again for a USAC midget race or maybe a winged sprint car race. I really liked that Winchester started on time and ran the street stocks last so I could get out of there in time to make it most of the way home following the race. If you have never made it to
Winchester, I highly recommend it.

My 2006 season race viewing stats after Winchester (IN) Speedway:

Races: 10
Tracks: 7 (5 new)
States: 6 (1 new)