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add another car to the watch list for the Keystone Cup
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The Reed Report; Part II
The Westside Honda Maxim made its first visit deep into All Star territory the past weekend with races at a very slick Attica Raceway Park and also Fremont Speedway in Ohio. This is how driver Matthew Reed summed up the events of the weekend...
"After getting things a little better organized we headed to Attica Raceway Park in Ohio on Friday night to compete in what was meant to be a regular night of 410 sprintcar racing. The track had a $10,000 to win World of Outlaws Late Model feature, and the sprintcars as such were a support to the Late Models.
The sprintcar numbers were boosted due to the cancellation of the All Star events for this weekend, meaning that many of the gun All Star teams would be competing at both Attica and Fremont as their regular races had been cancelled. Now the locals gave me plenty of warning that we were to expect a slick track, as the Late Model guys prefer to race on a smooth, slick surface. We hot lapped our car and things felt ok, but then had to sit through what seemed like hours as 56 Late Models time trialed for 2 laps each and then they ran 5x heat races. With this they blew the cushion clear to the edge of the track and in some places blew right through over the edge, leaving us an incredibly slick surface to race on.
The heat races here for a club show are drawn from a random draw, and they take the top 4 finishers to the A, the next 4 to the B and the next 3 to the C. The local guys warned me that if you started too far back you would be screwed, as the track is impossible to pass on when it is like this. Sure enough, I pulled the worst possible marble to start dead last in the first heat race!
We were pitted alongside current All Star champ Greg Wilson, and as his crew bolted on a 96 inch left rear for the heat race I figured we was going to be in trouble. Hell, I’ve never even ran a 96" left rear tyre! Anyway we go out and frankly it was just so bad words cannot describe how things went. I had plans to try to get to the top and lean against the thin cushion that was left on the edge of the track, but starting last in the heat race I couldn’t even see the edge of the track for the dust.
It took 2 laps before the dust cleared enough that I could figure out which way the track went. I got rolling around and passed a couple cars, and then a guy spun right in front of me, leaving me nowhere to go. I pretty much hit him dead square at about 5 mile an hour and tried to push him out the way to clear a path to get through, which all worked pretty good, other than he kept going too and I never even picked up a spot out of it, leaving us with a 10th place finish and a C main start. The C was run straight after the heats and we didn’t really have too much time to change much other than fix the minor damage to the front of the car. We started 5th and tried the top, bottom, middle and nothing seemed to work any good. I spent the 8 laps racing the hell out of some guy for 6th place in the C! It was just one of those nights where nothing seemed to work, and I was pretty happy to get out of the place and move on down the road to Fremont for the next race!
It would have been easy to get all upset about such a poor performance, but the good thing about racing so regularly is the next night presents a fresh opportunity to start again. I was somewhat concerned because for years Fremont Speedway has had a reputation as being arguably the slickest track in the country, and after the night before at Attica I wasn’t really in the mood for rolling around at half throttle all night. I mean, I wanted to race a sprintcar because they go fast, not roll around at 40mph at half throttle trying to not spin the wheels.
Well as luck would have it, there are new promoters at Fremont, and they must think that the whole slick track thing is crap too, because they prepared one of the wildest, sticky, rough, heavy race tracks you could get! Hallelujah!! Think of a wet, heavy Warrnambool at Easter time, or a Parramatta back in the days when it was called Granville and that’s about what we were dealt here! I mean, some guys were flipping in hot laps, and even myself on the first lap of hot laps I pulled a wheelstand the length of the front straight! Again we only got one lap to try to qualify in, although that was at least a better deal than the random draw we had at Attica. I tried to ensure I got a clean run at the flagstand for my lap but in trying to drive around the rough I ran clear off the edge of the track, so by the time I got back on the racetrack I was about 20 yards from the flagstand, leaving me with very little momentum to start my lap. We ended up 21st quick out of the 38 cars. This was good enough to make the invert and get us a front row start in the first heat race.
I was set to start alongside a guy called John Ivy, who is a multi track champion at Fremont. Anyways the mighty Aussie-built Maxwill engine won the drag race into the first corner and from there the supreme handling characteristics of the Maxim chassis allowed us to negotiate the rough, heavy surface with ease, as we drove away to win our first heat race on American soil!
The heat winners had to pull up on the front straight after the race and after a brief interview they gave us a trophy that we took up into the crowd and gave to a young kid of our choice. It was a somewhat daunting experience climbing up into the fairgrounds grandstand looking for a suitable young kid with all these people screaming and yelling at you and wanting to give you high fives and congratulations! Meanwhile back in the pits many of the local guys were struggling with the track conditions and started complaining, but we had our car pretty free and could roll around the track pretty nice, and frankly, I thought it was an awesome surface to race on! Way better than the ice we were expected to perform on the night before! Each to their own I guess… The way the format worked here was that the top 4 from each heat would directly transfer to the A, and then the highest qualifier would draw an invert for the feature, inverting a 6, 8 or 10. The cars that transferred from the B main would then get their time back and start after the inverted cars, so I found myself starting 17th courtesy of my average time trail, behind the guys that transferred from the B. The B in itself was like a regular feature, with many of the All Star guys fighting for one of the 4 spots on offer. To try to illustrate just how tough the competition is here, many of the guys that were at the front of the feature the night before at Attica barely made the show at Fremont.
Paul Weaver, who likes the slick and won at Attica with help from super mechanic Andy Potter, didn’t make the transfer out of the B, as did last weeks feature winner at Fremont Phil Gressman (11th) and Brock Mayes (6th), who ran 3rd the previous night at Attica. The four guys that did transfer from the B were Mark Keegan, Dustin Daggett, Brandon Martin and Kenny Jacobs – a pretty decent bunch indeed! We pretty much left the car real free to run the feature, as I felt it would be easier to steer the car if the front wheels were occasionally touching the ground. We got gridded up ready to go behind Dale Blaney, who ran 2nd the night before at Attica, with Dean Jacobs also just in front.
We made a pretty nice start and passed some guys, and within a few laps we got past Blaney and tagged on the back of Jacobs. Dean was boppin around the highline trying to make something happen, and sort of clearing a path and I was trying to follow him through. After about 8 laps Chad Blonde flipped over the edge of the track in turn 4 bringing about a red flag. There was another yellow a few laps later when someone lost a driveline, and I had an anxious moment trying to miss the errant torque tube laying in turn 3. At the restart I kept persisting to run the top and follow what Dean Jacobs was doing, but the top was just getting too heavy now and we was getting too tight and starting to bike the thing and get ugly. A few more laps in Dean flipped into the night sky in the 3-4 turn bringing about another red. I sort of conceded to myself whilst waiting for the race to restart that the potential to crash was quite high if I kept trying to drive right through the heavy stuff, so for the remainder of the race I got locked on the bottom. We passed some more cars to eventually finish in 9th place, which was our best result over here so far. We had plenty of people come up afterwards and congratulate us and what the thought was a good job, and almost everyone commented that in 20 years they had never seen a Fremont track like this. With that we headed to the car wash before leaving Ohio for a 10 hour drive into New York to make the World of Outlaws race the next night at Orange County.
As luck would have it, it rained pretty much non stop all the way up there and the race was inevitably postponed due to the rain. We headed to a hotel to get some rest and the next morning headed out to the Orange County Choppers shop to take a look around. These are the guys who have the TV show on Foxtel back home, and they have some absolutely amazing custom bikes on display up there.
We have now arrived back in Pennsylvania ready to take on the mighty PA Posse for the Keystone Cup. As I sit here I must say the weather looks pretty bad, as it is raining outside and meant to rain tomorrow when we race. We are meant to race 5 races over the next 6 nights, and I can only expect that it will be awfully tough. I mean, these guys regularly kick the Outlaw’s butts when they come here! The tracks we compete at include Grandview, Williams Grove, Lincoln, Selinsgrove and Port Royal. Basically 3 of the biggest, baddest ½ miles that exist and a couple ‘little’ 3/8 or 4/10 mile tracks!
Hopefully I can report in sometime next week with some positive news!"
The Reed Racing Sprintcar team thanks the following companies and people for their continued and valued support of their racing program:
Westside Honda – Mark and Danielle Charge
Workplace Safety Wear – Steve Courtney
Tritech Oils – Perry McCowatt
Dynamic Test Systems – Christen Barnard
EA Plant Hire
Maxwill Racing Engines
Lincoln 1845 ft/.35 mile T1=118MPH
Eldora 2287 ft/.43mile T3=135MPH
Port 2716 ft/.51 mile T3=TBD
Grove 2792 ft/.53 mile T3=135MPH
Selinsgrove 2847 ft/.54 mile T1=136MPH
"I didn't move to PA from El Paso in search of better
weather." Van May
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