This past weekend Dave Mass Racing made the trip up to River Cities Speedway in Grand Forks North Dakota for the 14th Annual John Seitz Memorial Late Model special.
Thursday night was a regular race night. There were 50 cars that showed up, and Dave had an unlucky draw, which resulted in starting in the tail end of his heat race in 10th position. They would take the top 4 drivers out of each heat race to advance to the main. Dave scratched his way up to 5th place before he ran out of laps, just missing the transfer position. This meant Dave had to run in the B feature in his last attempt to try to make the A feature. He would start in 7th place needing to get into the top two in order to transfer to the main event. Dave made his way up to 3rd place and fell just short of the transfer spot.
Friday night was the qualifying heat races for the main event that would take place on Saturday night. There were 52 late models that showed up and Dave would need to again try to finish in the top four of his heat race in order to automatically transfer to the main event on Saturday, which was a 92 lap feature race that would pay out $9,200 to win in memory of the #92 late model that John Seitz ran. Dave drew another rough starting position and had to start eighth in his heat. However after a long rain delay, the track ended up being very fast for the heat races, and he would go on to win the heat race from the back of the field. This automatically qualified Dave for the main event. However, because he was one of the eight top qualifiers, he and the seven other best drivers would have a dash for the pole position race to determine where each of their top eight starting positions would be. Dave would end up finishing fourth in that race. That was the last race of the evening and set the starting line up for Saturday when Dave would start in the fourth starting position in the main event.
On Saturday there was a full race show, but the main event for the late models would be the final race of the evening. Dave started in fourth place and after their fuel stop on lap 32, Dave was running in 4th with 60 laps remaining. After adding fuel, which added extra weight, the car just didn’t handle the same. Dave would end up slipping back into the field to about the 14th position at one point. Towards the end of the race when Dave’s car started to come around and start to handle better after burning off some fuel, he was able to recover a few positions and ended up finishing in the 10th position over all for the big weekend.
This was an extremely successful weekend. Out of the 52 drivers that showed up for this event, there were probably 40 of the absolute best Late Model drivers in the area. So Dave and the team were very satisfied with the 10th place finish overall.
Congratulations to the #2 team on a great weekend of solid racing.
