410 Sprints...sweet

Well, I've FINALLY seen 410 sprints.  Last Saturday we went to Port Royal Speedway.  I made sure to get there early enough for hotlaps because I had been told we could get in the infield to watch.  It was pretty cool to see the sprints fly down the front straight from the infield.  

Once we got up to our seats, the show started big with a makeup feature for the sprints.  Todd Shaffer (88) and Greg Hodnett (22) had a great battle going through the middle stages of the race.  Shaffer worked traffic much better, pinning Hodnett behind slower cars.  On the final lap of the race, a right rear tire blew out on one of the lapped cars as the leaders caught him, sending him hard into the fence with a big tumble.  For some reason the leaders never got the checkered flag.  In the final lap dash it was still Shaffer holding off Hodnett for the win.  

The late model heats were next.  They just could not seem to stop wrecking.  30 cars were on hand for the night, but not all of them made it to feature time.  One driver went hard into the backstretch wall while in a side-by-side battle.  Another wreck sent one late model driver back to the pits with a lot of angry people waiting for him.  The black #17 car I think it was, drove someone all the way down into the turn 1 guardrail.  His victim then bounced back out into traffic and got hit by two more cars.  Needless to say, there were a lot of people not happy with the 17 car.  The sprint heats went off without a hitch.  

Since it was pretty cold, we decided to walk around and went to the infield to watch the street stock (or pro stock, whatever) feature.  Standing at the end of the backstraight makes street stocks look a lot faster!  Not knowing the race order, we noticed the sprints were rolling out for their main next, so we hurried back to our seats at the conclusion of the street stock feature.  In the second sprint car feature, it was still all Todd Shaffer.  He came from 6th to take the lead on a mid-race restart and never looked back.  Hodnett had more of a challenge coming from 12th to the top 4 by race end.  Our final race of the night was the late model feature which we decided to watch from the infield.  It was pretty cool.   I had my eye on the orange #15 car who had to have made the most passes throughout the race.

My first racing trip to Southern/Central PA was pretty cool.  Hopefully I'll get down there again sometime.  I need to go see the WoO or at least the rest of the PA posse race. (Dewease, Rahmer, etc.)