Lernerville Speedway
Notes: Lanigan aims for Lernerville breakthrough
By Kevin Kovac
World of Outlaws Late Model Series
Darrell Lanigan
Ask Darrell Lanigan if this will be the year that he finally breaks through to win the Firecracker 100 presented by GottaRace.com at Lernerville Speedway after three consecutive runner-up finishes and he’ll just shrug his shoulders.
The silence from Lanigan, 41, of Union, Ky., isn’t surprising. He’s not big on talking about himself in general, so discussing his prospects for victory in a race that has become a thorn in his side certainly doesn’t rank high on his priority list.
But make no mistake: while Lanigan might not wax poetic about pursuing victory in the $30,000-to-win World of Outlaws Late Model Series event that takes over Lernerville this weekend (June 23-25), his tight-lipped approach demonstrates just how badly he wants to win one of the national tour’s crown jewels.
“All I want to do is lead that last lap,” said Lanigan, reiterating the comment he made prior to last year’s Firecracker 100 weekend.
Lanigan has come agonizingly close to the checkered flag in the last three editions of the summer-starting spectacular. But while the three straight bridesmaid finishes have earned him a cool $51,423, that’s little consolation for a competitive driver.
Last year’s Firecracker 100 marked the first time Lanigan finished second without leading a lap; he reached the runner-up spot on lap 82 but wasn’t able to get close enough to seriously challenge winner Shane Clanton of Fayetteville, Ga. In ’08 he led the race’s first 69 laps before Brian Birkhofer of Muscatine, Iowa, gained control and ran away from the field for a convincing triumph, and in ‘09 he paced laps 13-93 before Jimmy Mars of Menomonie, Wis., swept by him to emerge victorious after rallying from a lap-27 pit stop to change a cut tire.
Lanigan, who has never won a feature at Lernerville, certainly enters this year’s Firecracker 100 with momentum on his side. Third in the WoO LMS points standings despite missing the season opener at Florida’s Volusia Speedway Park because of a fractured tailbone, Lanigan has four victories and eight top-three finishes in 10 starts on the tour this year.
One of his victories came in the Cash Cow 100 on March 19 at Columbus (Miss.) Speedway — ending his frustrating, career-long chase of a 100-lap triumph on the WoO LMS — and on June 11 he contended for a $100,000 win in the DIRTcar UMP-sanctioned Dream XVII at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway before a carburetor problem relegated him to a third-place finish.
In addition, Lanigan got his Rocket No. 29 tuned up for this weekend’s action by entering last Friday night’s weekly DIRTcar UMP Late Model program at Lernerville. He marched from the 15th starting spot to a second-place finish. a run he hopes to top by one spot on Saturday night.
Looking for more
Josh Richards won his first WoO feature of the season last Saturday night at Winchester (Va.) Speedway, but don’t think for a minute that the tour’s two-time defending champion will be any less hungry this weekend at Lernerville.
Richards, 23, of Shinnston, W.Va., still has some goals to motivate him. His Winchester triumph, of course, came behind the wheel of the Ernie Davis-owned No. 25, so he still needs to guide his father Mark’s Rocket Chassis house car to its first Victory Lane stop in 2011. He also dearly craves a win in the Firecracker 100, a race that would immediately become the signature checkered flag of his Dirt Late Model career.
“If we could win that race, it would mean everything,” Richards said. “It’s a crown jewel event, a World of Outlaws event and it’s close to home.”
Richards won last year’s first Firecracker 100 semifeature and was the runner-up in the second — the same format, featuring 30-lap, $6,000-to-win events on Thurs., June 23, and Fri., June 24, leading into the 100-lapper on Saturday evening, will be repeated this weekend — but he started and finished seventh in the long-distance headliner. It was unspectacular but still his best finish in the Firecracker 100 following runs of ninth in ’07, 12th in ’08 and eighth in ’09.
“We were good in the preliminary features last year and we’ve always qualified well (for the 100),” said Richards, who hasn’t started worse than seventh in the event. “But for some reason when the track gets like it does for the Firecracker, we’re just lacking a little bit there. We’ve always been a fifth- to 10th place car.
“I feel really good about this year though. We’ve been working on some things, and every year I feel that I’m teaching myself to get better and better in 100-lappers just from watching these other guys and knowing how hard to run. That track is a challenging place for the Firecracker because it slows down and it feels like you’re never hooked up, so it takes experience to run up front and I feel like we’ve got the laps there to know what we should do.”
Clanton goes with Capital
Shane Clanton has consistently been one of the fastest entrants in the Firecracker 100, but can he continue his strength this year driving a 2-race-old Capital Race Cars machine?
Save for a quiet 10th-place finish in the 2009 Firecracker 100, the 35-year-old Clanton has perennially been a serious threat to capture the event’s unique trophy. He won last year’s event, of course, but prior to that he might have had the fastest car in the 2007 and 2008 editions of the race. In ’07 he appeared primed to sail by eventual winner Scott Bloomquist of Mooresburg, Tenn., to take the lead on lap 88 but had his momentum broken by Bloomquist’s sixth-sense groove change (Clanton finished sixth), and in ’08 an early tangle with Richards knocked him from contention (he finished 24th after retiring shortly after the incident because he slapped the wall while attempting to rally from the rear).
All of Clanton’s previous visits to Lernerville have come behind the wheel of a Rocket car. This time he’ll unload a Capital machine that he built in collaboration with former Dirt Track World Championship winner Marshall Green, adding an element of uncertainty to any pre-race scouting report on him.
Odds and ends:
No WoO LMS regular has made more laps so far this season at Lernerville than Chub Frank of Bear Lake, Pa., whose three “competitive-practice” appearances in the 4/10-mile oval’s weekly shows have resulted in a win, a second and a fifth. ... Rick Eckert of York, Pa., could virtually bring his WoO career full-circle with a victory in the Firecracker 100. The only driver to start all 292 WoO features contested since 2004, Eckert has won two of the last four events and leads the points standings entering this weekend’s action. He’s on his best roll since 2006, when he won eight of the tour’s first 17 events before a heartbreaking early-August incident at Lernerville dive-bombed his championship. Eckert was bidding for a dramatic last-lap win that evening when he got too low in turn four and spun to a stop, dropping him from second to 19th in the finish and from second to sixth in the points standings. ... Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., is hoping to find the combination that made him one of the stars of last year’s Firecracker 100 activities. The 37-year-old former WoO champion is mired in a frustrating slump on this year’s tour, entering this weekend’s competition winless and sitting fifth in the points standings. In 2010, however, he won the Friday-night semifeature and finished a career-best fourth in the 100-lapper after leading laps 20-72. ... The month-long break in the WoO LMS schedule that ended last Saturday at Winchester was helpful to Tim Fuller of Watertown, N.Y., who needed every bit of that off-time to work on his new self-owned Dirt Late Model program. Fuller, who left John Wight’s Gypsum Express team in April and started his own operation backed by Pennsylvanian Chad Sinon’s BPG, ran the late-April and early-May WoO events with just one engine at his disposal. He’s since added a backup powerplant, giving him a bit more piece of mind as he dives into the busiest part of the tour’s 2011 schedule. ... Scott Bloomquist won the inaugural Firecracker 100 in 2007, but he hasn’t put his familiar No. 0 in the spotlight since then. He will enter this weekend’s action looking to recapture his ’07 magic; his finishing record over the past three years shows a seventh in ’08 (from the 20th starting spot), 24th in ’09 (dropped out on lap 43) and eighth in ’10. ... The ticket packages and single-day advance-sale tickets can be purchased on-line at www.lernerville.com and http://www.dirtcar.com/tickets or by calling (724) 353-1511.
