Kevin Kovac's Take Five
Take Five: Hill shapes up Bulls Gap
In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):
No. 1: During my interview with engine builder-driver-promoter Vic Hill for this week’s Inside Dirt Late Model Racing column, one of the things I didn’t get in the story was his analysis of what he’s done to the track surface of Volunteer Speedway to make the 4/10-mile, high-banked oval in Bulls Gap, Tenn., noticeably racier since taking over its operation in 2022. “Basically it is a lot of work,” said the 61-year-old from Mosheim, Tenn., who oversees all aspects of track prep. “But just the configuration of the track, the way it was before, I knew where, once the race got going, where it was going to be impossible to pass. And the track’s wide but you couldn’t use it, so I just started changing the banking and, actually, even where you would have to (decelerate) entering the corner to make it to where, when you exit, if you're side-by-side, both guys have got a chance to pass. I mean, even that race that I won there (last August’s Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series 40-lapper), I passed them in the middle. And it was Jimmy (Owens) and (Cory) Hedgecock … they're familiar with the place and they’re banging the cushion and they’re on the top and hammer down, and about lap 20 I drove around both of them in the middle. Which comes into kind of like a Dale McDowell thing — it was tire management because I did take care of my right-rear better than they were because they were running so hard on the top.”
No. 2: Speaking of Hill’s victory at Volunteer last summer — a $4,000 triumph that was his first win of any kind in seven years — he recalled being hesitant to enter a race he was promoting when SAS director Ray Cook suggested he compete. “Ray said, ‘You need to come over here and race,’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, if I win, it’s going to look bad,’” Hill related. “He said, ‘Oh, just come on,’ but, well, you know, I ran, I think, three or four races last year, but I ran a lot of laps at Bulls Gap because when I would work on the track and do something to see if I’d made it better, I’d go there and run my car. And so I told Ray, I said, ‘Well, you know, I know everything about this place’ — backwards, forwards, pack car, water truck, race car, I’ve done everything there.” When Hill did indeed turn his intimidate knowledge of Volunteer into a victory, the reaction was positive, but he realized that competing in his own events couldn’t be a regular occurrence. “I mean, if I went and did that every time, as a promoter, obviously people would hate me and say I’m cheating,” he remarked. “But I hadn’t won a race in so long, it was fun. I mean, it was a great night for everybody.”
No. 3: Hill won’t race himself in his April 14-18 Gauntlet event at Volunteer, but he will field a car for Newport, Tenn.’s Jimmy Owens. It’s a brand-new CVR Race Car that Hill has assembled after his previous machine sustained too much damage to be repair when Owens rolled it in March 13’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series feature at Volunteer. “It bent the halo a little bit and it broke all the front suspension rack,” Hill said of Owens’s wreck. “It was a big fix for sure, and anytime you tweak the center of these cars, you never know what you’re going to get the next time you go race, so we built a new one.” Owens tested the new vehicle at Bulls Gap on Wednesday evening in preparation for the Gauntlet.
No. 4: Travel costs for racers continue to rise as this week’s average price for diesel fuel (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration) hit $5.64 per gallon. That’s up another 24 cents from the previous week and sits $2.11 above the average diesel price back on Jan. 19 just before the start of Georgia-Florida Speedweeks. It’s certainly a significant increase to the travel budgets for the many teams that have to fill 250-gallon toterhome fuel tanks.
No. 5: Wondering how much Dirt Late Model teams are paying for racing fuel these days? I checked with Tye Twarog, who owns a racing parts business as well as Nick Hoffman’s WoO team, and he said he’s currently selling 116-octane racing fuel for $13.50 per gallon. According to Twarog, all racing fuel prices went up 5 percent over the past two weeks.
