Josh Bayko

I wasn’t there for the Go Fund Me 100 either year. There’s enough horror stories from previous events that it drove the decision home not to go. And from taking to a driver who went, no, the surface wasn’t any better. That said, there are strong rumors that Mansfield has run its last race under this promoter, and it may very well be it’s last race ever.

They can run non-sanctioned events, but they have to get it approved by the sanction. The rule is that way so tracks can’t expect a full WoO roster if they schedule before or after a WoO swing in their area. As far as Mansfield, There is no dirt track that is more hated by drivers than Mansfield. The surface would be better suited as a rock crawling course.

It doesn’t say good things about big block modified racing if the division can’t support big shows hours away from each other on the same day.

It’s also way closer to home for Mat.

One thing about dirt tracks that most people don’t know is that the typical track surface is only six to twelve inches deep. As far as the “perfect” surface, I’m not sure there is such a thing. I’ve seen fantastic races at tracks that had surfaces that have consisted of little more than just fill dirt, and I’ve seen stinkers at tracks that have surfaces that are clay.

Most popular division? Open wheel mods. They run the division basically everywhere in some form or another.

Absolutely not. He wasn’t even old enough to race in NJ when Flemington was open.

It was more or less a bracket on the back of the LR birdcage and a couple spring rods instead of 4 link bars. It’s primary function was to keep the car up on the bars all the way through a lap, even off throttle going into the corner.

The debate in in late model racing that’s really going on now isn’t Davenport’s ‘15 vs ‘19, it’s Davenport’s ‘15 vs. Brandon Sheppard’s ‘19. Sure in terms of big wins, Davenport’s year is still better, but Sheppard has run 59 races, won 24 of them, and finished outside of the top ten just 6 times (and one of those is a race he was fighting for the lead and popped a motor). In the course of all that (and because he won the Dream and Million), he’s already at over 600k on the year. If he gets stupid hot to close the year out, with some of the money that’s still available to win, and what is practically the guaranteed 100k WoO title, he’s looking at anywhere from 750-900k. It’s an interesting debate.

The device let him get seat time at a lot of tracks he had never seen in good, consistent equipment. Sure, he had seen a lot them before during his year with CBR, but it’s become really apparent that despite having maybe the biggest budget in the sport, that they are not a good team. That year had to put a hurting on his confidence. I personally think the device itself was really much ado about nothing. All it was designed to do was to keep the car on the bars even off throttle. In the time since every sanction outlawed that items that made up the device, everybody else has figured out how to do what the device was accomplishing even within the now much tighter box when it comes to rules.

The Rumley device did help him in 2015, but not in the way most people think. It’s not that he didn’t have the best car that year, because he did. It was more that it gave him the seat time and confidence to go from good regional driver to elite level national driver. As far as pure equipment, the stuff Landers puts under him is light years better than the stuff Rumley had, not that the Rumleys have junk, but having a brand new hauler, multiple cars and engines, a paid crew and an engineer on retainer is whole different animal.

Most of wildly successful tracks leave everything up. They look at the negative posts and see what could use work.

There’s a track around my way that deleted anything even slightly negative for years. It closed for good about a month ago.

I am an open late model fan and been to plenty of big races without Bloomquist (or Davenport, or Sheppard if we’re talking more recently) for various reasons. It didn’t temper my excitement at all. It didn’t make the event any less exciting.

It’s just stupid to hinge your excitement of the race on one guy. There will be plenty of good cars there, and the racing at Fulton is always pretty solid. If that’s not good enough for you, you might need to rethink your fandom.