Kevin Kovac's Take Five
Take Five: Rough tubing trip for 14 team
Trey Mills in his Cedar Lake debut. (photosbyboyd.smugmug.com)
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: Just days after Trey Mills’s superb run at the front of Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway’s Prairie Dirt Classic, the 18-year-old and his crew joined dozens of World of Outlaws Late Model Series racers and fans for the national tour’s annual tubing excursion down the Apple River near Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis. It wasn’t quite as fun and relaxing as they would’ve liked. They did enjoy themselves, but their pre-USA Nationals outing went a bit awry as Mills crew member Colbey Richman told my DirtonDirt colleague Kyle McFadden. “So I really even wasn’t that — air quotes — hydrated,” Richman joked, remarking that he had only down a couple adult beverages. “I was just going down the river and all of a sudden someone’s like, ‘Hey, Colbey, get on Ox (Spotify radio), and I was like, ‘All right.’ So I got on the Ox (on his portable speaker) and I started playing ‘Kodak Black’ (from his iPhone), and here we are, on the river, and I’m like, ‘Hell yeah, it’s badass.’ ” But after Richman “dozed off for like two minutes,” he awoke to find his phone missing. “I look in the cooler and it ain’t in the cooler. I done dropped in the water,” he mourned. What’s more, Mills dropped the speaker in the river and the team’s crew chief, Colton Blair, discovered that his wedding ring had slipped off and was lost in the water. “I’m telling you, it was a bad day on the river for the 14 camp,” said Richman, who did find a nearby Verizon store afterward to pick up a new iPhone while Blair purchased a replacement ring
No. 2: Longhorn Chassis managing partner Steve Arpin finally had his chance to compete in a Dirt Late Model for the first time in 15 years during Thursday’s opening night of the WoO-sanctioned USA Nationals. Uncertain of when he’d be able to pilot his No. 00 machine after his plans to run a Repairable Vehicles.com Tri-State Series event earlier this month at Deer Creek Speedway in Spring Valley, Minn., were dashed by the washout of the NAPA Gopher 50 weekend, he found the Limited Late Model program on the USA Nationals undercard to be a perfect opportunity. While Arpin, 42, didn’t get to race against his good friend Mike Sorensen, the father of WoO regular Dustin Sorensen who was planning to make his own return to action at Deer Creek, he had a rather enjoyable return to the full-fender division, winning a B-main and running as high as 14th in the 25-lap before a midrace retirement.
No. 3: Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., certainly sported an interesting racing ensemble for Thursday’s USA Nationals opener. He debuted a new driver’s uniform designed to mimic the uniform of the Chicago Bears, his favorite NFL team. It looked pretty darn good, with the upper “jersey” portion of the uniform carrying Pierce’s number 32 and the “pants” boasting the orange and blue stripes and socks of the Bears outfit. Pierce, who raced last year wearing a Chicago Bears lookalike helmet, said a friend at sponsor Low Voltage Solutions suggested the Bears uniform idea and Velocita made it a reality. “They even went out of their way to find the correct colors,” Pierce wrote in his Facebook post that included photos of the uniform. Notable is that while Pierce brought out the Bears look timed around the start of the team’s training camp, he wore it “in Packers/Vikings country” in the state of Wisconsin and just 45 minutes from Minneapolis.
No. 4: Neat thing I noticed about Cedar Lake’s USA Nationals field on Thursday: the 50 entries included the rare trifecta of a set of brothers (Gordy and Trevor Gundaker), sisters (Amelia and Layla Eisenschenk) and a father-son combo (Brent and Matthew Larson).
No. 5: The Aug. 6-8 Sunoco North-South 100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., has some extra action in store this year with Saturday’s Ron and Madeleine Jerger Dash for Cash for heat winners. The event, presented by Cincinnati Financial Advisors with additional sponsorship from Longhorn Chassis, Kayak Mike and Rocket Chassis, will offer an attractive $5,000 prize (plus a $500 Rocket Chase gift certificate) to its winner, with the remaining five positions paying $1,000, $500, $250, $150 and $100. The finish of the dash will also establish the starting lineup for the first three rows of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series 100-lap finale. Notable also is that with the dash’s payout alongside the $75,000 North-South 100 prize, the $6,000-to-win semifeatures and the $10,000 Pit Crew Challenge that will be contested for the first time during the event, a single driver/team can leave Florence with $102,000 in earnings.
