May 10 – 11, 2024 | Madison, IL
Just across the wide Mississippi from trendy and historic St. Louis, minutes from the legendary BBQ’s, the Arch and world-famous entertainment venues lie the WWTR’s facilities. It is a massive complex and includes a one-fourth mile drag strip, 1.25-mile super-speedway, 2.0-mile road course, the Gateway Kartplex, and the adjacent Gateway National Golf Links.
It was to be another 3-race weekend with sixteen points awarded for a win in each race. A definite “must attend” if you are trying to win the SVRA National Points Championship.
To allow competitors to run as many races as possible on any given weekend, SVRA will often combine the race car groups. This weekend, our race was comprised of us (Group 6 – large motor production sports cars built before 1972 plus Group 10 – NASCAR Stock Cars and Trans Am cars and finally Group 11 – IMSA & FIA Prototypes. As if the speed differential was not already enough between a 60-year-old production-based street driven sports car (US) vs a NASCAR stock car or the Budweiser Porsche Protype, we must run on DOT approved “Street Tires” while they race on full Goodyear or Pirelli racing slicks. Jeesh! Talk about a handicap. And the driving philosophy when you are racing an old 3500-pound stock car vs. running a $150,000. limited production historic vintage car is a tad different. To quote Harry Hogge (Robert DuVall) trying to calm down Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise) from Days of Thunder – “He did not hit you. He rubbed you – and rubbings racing”!
Adding to the weekend’s adventure, the track’s surface is like a cheese-grater. Now, race tires normally “chunk” or throw off little particles of rubber as they consume themselves, but WWTR gives new meaning to chunking. Race one was ridiculous. At times I wondered if I was not in a paintball fight. Chunks of the hot rubber coming and bouncing off us from all directions. They were filling the brake ducts, the grill, bouncing off my helmet with a huge “whack” and just flying all over the place coating the car with black streaks of hot rubber. And Race 2 got worse. In race two, I was behind a former Dale Ernhardt Jr. Budweiser stock car going around the oval when he shredded a tire and sent the carcass into the right side of the Corvette tearing off a chunk of fiberglass fender and logging itself against the header. I was leading in my class and certainly wasn’t going to stop so by the end of the race, the stock car’s tire had become a black gluey smoking mess which took me and the crew most of the rest of the afternoon to extract and get the car ready for race 3.
Half an hour before the third race, SVRA came and asked all of us if we wished to skip the 3rd. race but we were there for points and in unison we all said – “no way we came here to race” None of us were going to leave without those points. We all felt that we had earned them. Also, by race three, The Hoosier tire truck had run out of our size, so we decided to take it easy as we were going to have to run on a set of totally used up tires from race one. As it turned out, we all sort of slowed down a tad for race three but Colby still got first in class thus getting the win in all three races, leaving St. Louis with a 12-point lead in the championship points standings. Now’s a bit of time off before we were to head to Pittsburgh International Raceway and the start of seven races in 3 weeks.