Canandaigua Speedway - The AMSOIL Great American CT Tour

The month is August, the locale is mid-state New York, and the venues are dirt tracks. In eight days we visit three of the premier dirt tracks of the Northeast located in upstate New York. And in doing so, we were privileged to witness the Tony and Brett shows and see some great Sprint Car and NE Big Block Modified racing.

The NE Modifieds are to dirt racing here in New York as the Whelen Modifieds are to asphalt racing in this region. And when the winged Sprint Cars come to town, all heck breaks loose. The fans get their cake and eat it, too.

Canandaigua Speedway, Utica-Rome Speedway, and Fonda Speedway are all located along a line running east to west midway up the state and all we had to do was get on toll road I-90 and it would take us near the first and the last in this series. For U-R, we only had to travel east a few miles.

We were staying at the Villages RV Park in Oneida, New York, a part of the Turning Stone Resort Casino, which is owned by the Oneida Indian Nation. This was one of the nicest “campgrounds” we’ve seen on our Tour to date. The grounds were immaculately kept, it was all paved, and it had everything we needed for an extended stay of more than three weeks while we tasted the various racing facilities of the great state of New York.

Having just left the Watkins Glen area the week before, we knew there was going to be a Sprint Cup race there this same weekend and we were glad to miss all of that confusion. Someone else would pull off an escape too.

Canandaigua Speedway

This was a cool track, owned by the World Racing Group, but the sanction that ran the Sprint races was the Empire Super Sprints referring to the New York state motto, the Empire State. We would also see the Northern Modifieds in good numbers this night.

The promoter here, Jeremie Corcoran, treated us special and we parked our Tour bus right beside the main grandstands where all of the fans would see the flame-shrouded motorhome and partake of our offerings of free catalogs, brochures, and stickers from AMSOIL, Holley, CV Products, and our newest Tour sponsor, E3 Spark Plugs—welcome aboard guys.

The Sprint Car pits were located under some great big trees and had a real country feel to them. I can see why Tony would come here to escape the avalanche of fans and media he encounters at the NASCAR tracks. The only problem was that we wouldn’t get to see much of his mastery of Sprint Cars this night.

The heat races were run in a rush to try to beat the oncoming bad weather coming off of Lake Ontario, much like most days in late summer, but we did get to see how the best of the best negotiate tracks like this one.

Both the track points leader and Tony ran similar lines around the track that were unique. Each ran separate heats, so what they did stood out. On the start and at each restart after a caution, both would enter Turn 3 (I was watching from this end of the track) with a quick turn-in and drive straight ahead toward the inside of the track, follow the bottom groove, then when exiting Turn 4, drive straight toward the wall for, say, 50 feet or so and then turn to go along the front stretch wall.

This driving style got them into the turn well by braking straight ahead. Yes, I said braking. That had to be the only way they got the car slowed down. At the exit, running the short straight line got them off better because the car was accelerating in a straight line instead of the rear end being hung out, spinning the tires.

They both only did this line long enough to gain a half to full straightaway lead, then relaxed somewhat into a fairly normal line. The reason it stood out was because almost no one else was running this odd line. And no one was as fast as these two.

It was a line I know well because I ran a similar line while racing karts on dirt back in the mid ’80s. When everyone else was throwing their karts sideways into the turns to slow them, I was braking straight ahead on entry, driving straight ahead through the middle and straight off the turns, and I won my fair share of races doing that over guys who had more power than I did.

Once the heats were completed, the rains came and washed away the rest of the event. The action was short, but I learned a whole lot from this. What I described above was very similar to the way I have seen successful Dirt Late Model drivers drive. At Paducah in 2010 I saw one well-known driver who has won many touring features brake into Turns 1 and 3, ride the middle straight ahead, and then drive more straight off the turns taking the big win over more aggressive drivers who were running sideways most of the race.

Utica-Rome Speedway

Located just east of Syracuse, this was the center of New York racing and while we were in the area, we visited the Rome, New York, Sports Hall of Fame which included information about, and one of, Richie Evans’s race cars. He was the most successful asphalt Modified racer of all time, winning seven championships.

It was a great event and every one came out to see some top-level Empire Sprint Car racing. The Race of Champions Northeast Modified dirt car tour was also racing for $10,000-to-win. Brett Hearn had his new car on hand and won his fourth race in the last five and posted another in his record of more than 800 wins in his career collecting the ten grand in the process. And it was great to see this track that started out as a 1/4-mile asphalt racetrack in 1961, continue to draw huge numbers of racers and spectators.

This facility was kept up extremely well and was one of the cleanest of the older tracks we have seen. Everything was well organized and there was a family section set up where alcohol wasn’t allowed. The track had no walls in Turns 1-2 and 3-4 so that when a car went wide, it was able to continue; whereas if there had been walls, the night would have ended. We’ve always liked to see that in a dirt track.

This was a fast track that held moisture well. It ended up more black slick in the end, something Brett would allude to in his post race interview where he said his new car worked best.

Seeing the celebration and the excitement of the fans made me feel that this side trip was well worth it. My thanks go out to track manager Barb Clark for letting us attend on such short notice. I did observe that Barb was everywhere and anywhere she was needed throughout the show and that’s what makes a track successful, attention to detail.