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Saturday, May 18

Saturday night, May 18 was Kids’ Night at Rice Lake Speedway. Initially, when Rice Lake Speedway LLC bought the track, one of the first things that track owner Kolby Kiehl mentioned to me was that he wanted to have Kids’ Night much earlier this year. I didn't say anything but I was kind of questioning whether it would be a good idea or not, with school still in session. Turns out that his thought was spot-on, as it was by far the biggest that I can recall.

The place was absolutely packed with folks and it was hard to find a parking place on the grounds. The weather was beautiful, and it also didn't hurt that they set a record for bikes given out at more than 100. There were also gift baskets given out. When it comes to Kids’ Night, Rice Lake has always done it up the best.

ABC Raceway had to cancel due to weather, and the 93-car field of cars signed in to race contained at least a dozen who were ABC regulars. Their loss was our gain.

Anyway, it did the heart good to see so many folks out at the races and seemingly having a very good time. It there's one thing that announcer Ben Brost is best at, it’s stirring up the crowd and he had them literally foaming from the mouth on Saturday. Seeing that is fun for me.

The improvements continue at the track. This week it was stepboards for the aisle seats in the grandstands, and a new fence along the walkway in front of the grandstand.

While things were busy in the grandstands, there was plenty going on in the pits, too. Visiting with rookie Midwest Mod driver Mike Grover, he had raced for 12 years in the Pure Stocks and just decided he needed something different. The Mid Mods will be a challenge but he was looking for something fresh and new to try, so good luck to him this year.

Bentley Prochnow snuck in last week as a new driver in the Mid Mods. What I didn't learn until this week was that he is only 13 years old and certainly the youngest driver now racing at the track.

Marcus Dunbar was on hand to test out his latest sharp-looking Modified. What I didn't notice until Saturday was that Cole Spacek is also in a Dunbar-built chassis Modified this year also.

Hall-of-Famer Rich Bishop was back behind the wheel of a race car on Saturday but this time, instead of driving a Super Stock, he was wheeling the Franson team's Street Stock. We'll have to see if this was a “one-off” or not.

A late arrival on Saturday was former track regular Shane Kisling. He is back racing in the Super Stocks. He won a lot of races at Rice Lake driving a Super and that combination feels right to me.

I was also happy to see Joe Ott make his debut with his Street Stock on Saturday. I’d been missing him in the lineup so far this year and happy to see him back at the track.

It was good to see former tech inspector and driver Mark Stender, out and about on this night. He has been fighting a health battle for nearly a year now and it was good to see him at the races.

I can think of three drivers who really caught the short end of the stick on Saturday night and for all three, it was just some bad choices by other drivers and back luck.

Tad Schoonover pulls all the way here from Eagle River a few times a year, either before ABC opens or when they aren't racing, and does a fine job. Saturday night his Mid Mod heat had no more than taken the green flag when another's driver's impatience ended up with Schoonover getting planted hard into the first turn wall. He hit hard enough that the entire rear end of his car was torn loose and it took some heavy equipment to help get the car into the trailer following the show.

Aaron Bernick hauled all the way down from Duluth to race his Pure Stock, as he does a few times each year. Saturday he was leading the feature race when he was doored hard, knocking him up the track and out of lead. He got hit so hard he almost lost control of the car. In retrospect, while we don't like to see it happen, he probably should have just faked a spin and brought out the yellow to get his spot back, which he would have. Instead, he fought the car back into control, losing a number of spots, but kept racing.

What this did later, however, was put him right in a bad place. He was then right in the middle of a grinding collision not of his doing. He went off on the wrecker and it was going to be a scramble to get his car fixed so he could race at Proctor on Sunday night. The irony was that the driver who slammed him eventually got the win, following a technical disqualification later.

Speaking of that, the apparent Pure Stock feature winner has now been disqualified two out of the three weeks the track has raced so far. I'll let you be the judge of what that means.

Perhaps the worst luck of the night fell on the shoulders of second-year Super Stock driver Jackson Larson. His first year of racing in 2023 was marked by any number of bad luck situations, some of which were his own doing as a young and inexperienced driver, and some due to other drivers’ own carelessness. They completely changed the look of the car for 2024 and hoped for better luck but Saturday night another driver spun on the frontstretch, Jackson couldn't avoid hitting him, and after the impact tore the whole right side of the car off, the vehicle flipped over on to its roof.

The best news was that he was okay in the violent hit and hopefully he decides to come back again for more, but he sure could use some better luck.

There were some fun things going on in the Super Stocks Saturday, with two generations of the Olson and Myers family battling it out all night. Ryan very nearly pulled off his first feature win just about one month into the season while Alex Myers has already won his first feature at Red Cedar. Alex ran strongly in the top five on Saturday. Both have exceeded my early expectations and have shown that they are fully capable of winning any night. How they can be so good so soon just boggles my mind. Saturday Ryan finished second and Alex was third, leaving both dads in the dust. Earlier in the night, in a side-by-side duel in a heat race, Ryan flat out whipped his dad but I'll bet there was a smile on Eric's face, under his helmet.

Kevin Adams’ feature win in the Modifieds was his 96th win in that class at Rice Lake and his 163rd in all classes at the track. On the other end of the scale, Dusten Holub and Tyler Vernon won their first ever.

I think I saw something on Saturday night that I had never seen before on a dirt track. There was a scramble during the Street Stock feature and some question of who should go to the back. While they were sorting it out, Jeff Nowak came down the frontstretch and reached his arm out and tapped on his roof.

On asphalt tracks, the officials usually let the drivers sort things out on their own if there was a spin and if a driver feels that he took out someone, he taps the roof to let the officials know that he was at fault and that he should go to the tail. But I had never seen a driver do that before on a dirt track. It was good sportsmanship on his part and something that, though most of the crowd didn't even notice or understand, I appreciate. Perhaps the fact his buddy Kyle Genett was going to get the dirty stick helped his decision.

After a couple of smooth nights of racing, things reverted back to 2023 in one bad way — the plethora of yellow flags. Last year there was way too much of that going on and after a couple of relatively smooth nights, things kind of went backward Saturday. Five yellows in the Midwest Mod and Mod features and six in the Super Stocks were way too many. Something needs to be done and if that means using the black flag once in while to settle some people down, I'm all for it. There's nothing that wrecks a race quicker that to see a yellow-flag filled contest.

About two dozen teams made their first appearance at the track for 2024 and just about everyone has been impressed with the new improvements to the track. And with the big crowd on Saturday, the key is to keep the momentum going.