Southern Indiana Loose Dirt Shootout

RC legend Butch Beebe and I took a road trip at the end of September down to North Vernon Speedway for the Southern Indiana Loose Dirt Shootout.  We really didn't know what to expect, but dirt oval is dirt oval, right? We had to have something that would work.

North Vernon Speedway is located oddly enough in the town of North Vernon, Indiana, about an hour and a half south of Indianapolis if I remember correctly (I wasn't driving so you'd have to ask Butch).  The track itself is in the city park, in what appeared to be the center of town.  Kind of a neat arrangement, although no one seemed to know how they were able to put a track in the middle of a city park and run nitro 1/8th scales until 2am without anyone complaining.  When questioned, one younger racer told me "You're not from here, if you were, you'd understand".  Nice to have a town that supports racing.

The two of us got down there about 5pm on Friday night for a little practice session to figure out tires and gearing.  When we got there, a guy named Toby was working the track and it looked pretty good.

My first impression, was Wow, that is a really small track.  Butch got out his measuring wheel and measured the run line to be about 135 ft with about a 155 ft run line further out in the track.  I'm not sure how many degrees the banking was, but it was pretty decent.  The surface was a solid sand/clay mix that they kept soft by breaking it up, then smoothing and rolling it out.  Made it very easy to drive on and the lane were wide enough with deep corners, which seemed to make for good racing.

The race was being run as mod for both late models and sprints, but Butch and I both agreed that 13.5 was plenty of motor for the track with the grip it had on it.  I was a little surprised, but my late model held up very well time-wise with everyone else practicing.  I think I might have had the fast lap of the night during practice. Butch's cars looked good out there too, so we put our stuff away and called it a night a little earlier than we had planned.

The following day we woke up and discovered that it had rained during the night.  Went over to the track where Toby was already up working the track with his tractor and a fairly unique little attachment that he built to do a controlled breakup of any uneven patches.   I'd like to have one of those things for some of the other tracks we run on.

Everything was looking good until about halfway through practice where the skies opened up and a deluge came down, drowning the track completely.  Even with the banking, standing water was sitting in the lower portions of the track. When the rains finally let up, they had some decisions to make.

There were 75-80 racers there from several different states that had traveled a long way to get there.  If it were club racing, they probably would have just packed it in and called it a night, but Toby jumped on his tractor and started to run in the track.  It was not pretty at first.  Clay mud stuck to the tires and just about everything on the tractor.  The once smooth surface was now rutted and looked like a muddy mess.  But Toby kept going around, and around.....

After about an hour of running it in, the mud finally started to lay back down.  Things were looking promising, although no one really knew what to expect the surface to race like.  

Race track completely changed on everyone, but everyone seemed to adapt pretty well.  Qualifiers were cut down to two and I broke in the first round with both of my cars (snapped a drive pin, and overheated).  Second qualifiers were a little better.  Made the A in my Sprint and was the second B qualifier in my late model.  Lost out on a chance to bump up to the A in late model when Butch passed me at the start finish line on the last lap.

I had a fast Sprint car in the main, but did not drive it very well.  Ended up fourth or fifth of the 8 cars in the main.

For a money race, the racing was surprisingly clean.  Racers seemed to have a lot of respect for one another.  For the most part, the slower car would move over as soon as they could and the faster car would wait for a real opportunity to pass rather than punting the car in front out of the way.

Probably the best part was meeting some really great racers and learning some new tricks for track maintenance.

All in all, a really good time.  If the opportunity presents itself, I would go back.