Wow what a trip ! I just got back from the second half of the USAC Indiana Sprint Week with stops this past week at Kamp Motor Speedway in Boswell which was a completely new track for my list and following that, Bloomington Speedway and Tri-State Speedway in Haubstadt.
Kamp was a neat, quarter mile bowl shaped track with good banking and horrible clay. They normally only run fendered divisions there and one of the track workers was very blunt with me and said their normal track prep consists of two laps with the water truck and then packing the crap out of it. On Thursday, he said, they watered it much of the day but when I arrived around 5:00 PM it was dry and hard and the water truck seemed to be broken down in turn three for about a half hour until they got it running again. Needless to say, by the time the B Main rolled around, it was a dusty mess. Still good racing, just couldn’t see it much less shoot the B Main or the A Main.
On to Bloomington for Friday night where we saw what the weekly Bloomington fans were saying the next day was “one of the best races they ever saw at Bloomington”. I have to agree. To say the A Main was outstanding would be a huge understatement ! That was some pretty intense stuff and lots of fun to shoot from a photographer’s standpoint.
Just when I thought I had seen the best racing I would see in 2008, Haubstadt followed up Bloomington’s high standard with an action packed night of racing that featured cars using the cushion that had piled up against the walls in the turns as another, faster lane of the track. The fastest way around the track actually seemed to be to go up against the wall and bounce off the moisture rich clay that was thrown up there by previous laps and then slingshot down the straights. Hunter Scheurenberg used that very groove to capture the biggest race of his young career in USAC. Levi Jones outraced both Jerry Coons Jr and Dave Darland to take the overall points total in theSprint Week contest. Let me just take a moment to re-iterate that Tom Hilfrich at Tri-State Speedway is a diety in the world of track preparation ! Thanks Tom for an excellent track in which to showcase my favorite division of racing.
I’ll be working on posting photos from all three nights this week so check back for links to the complete galleries as I update them.
