Lernerville Speedway
Frank OK after rollover (the car’s seen worse)
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt.com senior writer
The car Chub Frank rolled at Lernerville. (DirtonDirt.com)
SARVER, Pa. (June 23) — If there were any doubt that Chub Frank escaped unharmed from a wild series of flips he rode out during Thursday’s 30-lap Firecracker 100 preliminary feature at Lernerville Speedway, the veteran driver made his status entirely clear with his response to a pit-area visitor who asked what had happened to him. | RaceWire
“What do you mean, ‘What the hell happened?’ ” Frank said, eyeballing his inquisitor with an incredulous look — and then a big belly laugh.
Yes, the 60-year-old from Bear Lake, Pa., was A-OK. Seconding that notion was his fellow racer Alex Ferree, who was standing alongside Frank and noted that he had already had his chops busted by the irascible Hall of Famer.
“He said to me, ‘Why couldn’t my rear end make it through that (crash) without breaking?’” quipped Ferree, who works for the nearby company, Frankland Racing Supplies, that makes rear end assemblies. “I figured that meant he was fine. If you came over and Chub wasn’t busting balls, then you’d say he better get his head examined.”
There’s no doubt, though, that Frank was fortunate to avoid physical injury in the accident that ended his promising run in the opener of Lernerville’s marquee $50,000-to-win event, which for the first time since its birth in 2007 is sanctioned by the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series rather than the World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series. No amount of joking around could brush off the fact that he went flying through the air at high speed and came back to earth with a final, jolting thud.
Running seventh on lap eight of the preliminary feature after a runner-up finish in his heat (during which he made a spectacular backstretch save following a scrape with Earl Pearson Jr.) put him in the ninth starting spot, Frank tossed his familiar No. 1* into turns one and two on the high side of the 4/10-mile oval. He didn’t hit the corners correctly, however, and his car reared onto its right side to begin a barrel-rolling adventure.
“I just got in the cushion a little bit, got in on a bad angle and just caught the cushion wrong,” Frank said after the race, dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and sipping a bottle of Busch Light. “Then I couldn’t catch it fast enough to turn right, because it dug the frame in. Once you get over the cushion, once it bicycles, you just turn right (in an attempt to counteract the situation), but the problem was, it happened so fast it just hooked the frame rail and then it was over with.
“I just knew, ‘This is not gonna be good.’ ”
How many times did he flip before coming to rest on his wheels between the first and second turns (and fortunately not absorbing an additional hit from a passing car)?
“I have no clue,” Frank said. “I looked at the ground a couple, three times. I was thinking it wasn’t gonna be that hard of a hit, and then I go, ‘God, damn, I keep seeing this ground coming around.’ ”
Frank didn’t immediately climb out of his car, but “that’s because they’re talking to you,” he said, referring to the safety workers who quickly arrived at the scene of the incident. “If I tell them to get the hell out of my way, what do you want me to do?”
At any rate, Frank said the first official to his window “was just Francis” — his longtime buddy and fellow competitor (and target of many Frank jokes over the years) Steve Francis, who is now the Lucas Oil Series technical director.
“He just wanted to know if I was OK,” said Frank, who needed a moment anyway to untangle his safety equipment. “Nothing came down (to block his exit), but it pushed that one bar forward and it would hook my head-and-neck restraints when I would try to get out, so once I figured that out we got out.”
Frank maintained that he wasn’t even the slightest bit sore from his ordeal, aside from the mental pain of the searing look he received from his wife, Mary, upon his return to the pit area after the wreck.
“She wasn’t very happy,” Frank said, glancing over at his spouse sitting in a chair alongside his trailer. “Go ask her. She was sitting up there (in the pit stands watching the accident).”
Of course, Mary has — thankfully — not had to witness her husband roll a race car very often. Thursday marked just the third time in Frank’s 44-year racing career that he’s flipped. The first time was a high-flying tumble during the April 2008 Colossal 100 at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C. The other came two years later, in July 2010, when a scramble sent him over a couple times on the homestretch during a WoO feature at Attica (Ohio) Raceway Park.
Strangely, the Longhorn car Frank drove on Thursday has been through just as many flips since its original construction in 2015 as Frank has experienced in his entire life. It’s also changed hands and taken plenty of other hits over the last eight years since his cousin and teammate, Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa., brought the machine into the Chub Frank Racing fold.
“You know, that’s the same car that Boom (Briggs) ripped the whole rear clip off of at Farmer City (during the 2016 Illini 100). Same car,” Frank said. “And he flipped it here in the same corner I just did (during the September 2015 WoO-sanctioned Working Man 50). And it fell off the liftgate (of Briggs’s hauler in the pit area at Tri-City Speedway in Franklin, Pa., in August 2015). Same car.”
Doug Eck of Corry, Pa., was the second owner of the car, taking possession of it after Briggs’s infamous smack of Farmer City’s turn-three wall almost completely snapped off its back half.
“It was already Eck’s when (Briggs) ripped the rear clip off,” Frank said. “Doug actually owned it … he was there (at Farmer City) with (Briggs). He had just bought it. He goes, ‘Now that it’s ripped it up, it’s getting better in my price range.’ I said, ‘No it’s not. You have no idea.’
“Longhorn called me up (after Briggs’s wreck) and they said, ‘Hey, we’d like to get that car back so we can look at it.’ I said, ‘I already fixed it. It’s gone.’ And then (Eckert) won a lot of races in that car.
“And then (western Pennsylvania racer) Matt Sipes bought it for a Crate car and he flipped it on the wall at Eriez (Speedway in Hammett, Pa.,) a year-and-a-half ago,” he added. “I told him, ‘You know, your trade-in value just went down.’ ”
Frank said he’s put “three-and-a-half front clips” on the car, and at one time he had “half the front, rear clip, halo and the right rail off of it and replaced it.” But through all the hard blows and the repairs, it’s just kept on ticking.
“The damn thing has always been fast,” said Frank, who took back ownership of the car from Sipes last year. “She’s cherry.
“The car was good tonight,” he continued. “I was happy with it. I was actually happy in the slick with it. It was pretty good. We were trying to work that bottom in because they watered it (before the feature), and just before that yellow came out (on lap seven) I had the bottom worked in and I could really get off of four. I needed to be on the bottom and I thought we were gonna be OK, but …”
Frank, who two weeks ago ran the car in the Eldora Million and Dream at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, wasn’t immediately sure if the car would need more major frame work. But he asserted that he most likely won’t throw it in the scrap pile at his shop.
“I won’t worry about it till Monday or Tuesday when we really look at it,” Frank said. “It’s bad, but listen, there’s nothing at CFR that can’t be fixed.”
As Frank spoke, his crew, including an army of young relatives and other kids, were a few feet away stripping down the car and draining its fuel cell. They then stuffed it inside an enclosed trailer so one of Frank’s team members could take it back to the CFR shop and bring back an XR1 Rocket car that Josh Richards of Shinnston, W.Va., has driven this season as Briggs’s teammate.
Frank could have opted to spend the remainder of the weekend just concentrating on his Crate Late Model in pursuit of a $20,000 victory in the division’s RUSH-sanctioned Bill Emig Memorial, but he wasn’t ready to give up on the Firecracker 100. He’s the only driver who has started every Firecracker 100 finale since its inception in 2007 (his best finish is fifth in the inaugural event) so he’s going to try and maintain his perfect record.
“Listen, we’re already paid (entry),” he said, “so we might as well run it.”
