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| Race Report by Gary Thomas |
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CSRA Sprints At Sacramento |
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Sacramento, CA - August 26, 2005...Well
after making the 14 hour round trip venture down to Perris last
Saturday. I decided to stay close to home and try something
different this weekend. On Friday night I made my second trip of the
year to Sacramento Raceway Park. Okay it's not really a trip when
it's ten minutes from my house, but it’s a race nonetheless. On
this night the CSRA Spec Sprints and the Sprint 600s were the two
classes in action. After having dinner, my father and I headed out
for Sac Raceway. We last went to Sac Raceway on opening night back
in late April. It was so cold; we actually left early during that
night. Since it was the opening race, they were also having trouble
getting the show going so we didn’t see any racing that evening.
When we got there, we noticed that there was a little bit larger crowd than we had seen the last time we went. They had 11 spec sprints on hand with about 16 sprint 600s. Sac Raceway is a very flat and narrow quarter mile track. It basically looks like somebody brought dirt in and layed it in an oval shape, then put pillars up for the infield wall. One hilarious thing is that they used an American flag chair as the flag for the National Anthem! The announcer even told people to look out in the infield because that chair is the flag!lol! The track was pretty good early on. It had a decent amount of moisture in it and it was actually pretty racy.
Once the A-main for the spec sprints started, the track started to dry out and it became a one lane bottom feeder deal. Out of the 11 cars in attendance most of them dropped out by the midway point & only 5 of them finished. Billy Garcia took the lead from the start and dominated the 25 lapper. Second through fifth were Larry Nelson, Steve Nelson, Jerry Kobza and Bob Newberry.
The sprint 600 main was run before the spec sprint A-main so the track had a little bit of moisture in it. Normal 360 winged sprint car driver Chuck Gurney Jr. put on a good show to finish in second place. I really think if they had somebody that could bring big money in, the track could prosper. Widening the track and adding a little bank to it would be awesome, but probably will not happen with our luck. If they could add more money to the purse, more cars would show, but that looks unlikely at this point. A
friend of ours said something that I think is very true. He said,
“This is the only dirt track There are only two races left at Sacramento Raceway for CSRA this year and both are on very bad dates, so getting a decent crowd will be highly unlikely. The next date is Friday September 9th which is during the Gold Cup in Chico and the final date is Saturday October 14th which is the same weekend as the big spec sprint race up in Chico, and also falls on the Friday night in which the World of Outlaws are in Tulare. Hopefully the track sticks around for next year as it would be nice to have a track close by when the gas prices get really out of hand! |
