Tenth Place Finish at Ransomville an Exercise in Frustration for Williamson

By Dave Sully  - (Ransomville, NY) As if starting seventeenth wasn’t bad enough, a hard-baked single lane race track, which rubbered over early, turned the Memorial Weekend 50 lap Modified Feature at Ransomville Speedway on Friday, May 25^th, into a tough night for Mat, who was the point leader going into the race after a brilliant win the previous week. With the handicapping system employed at most dirt tracks, based on money won, forcing the faster cars to start back in the field, it’s a challenge to move up under ideal conditions.  However, when the track is only one lane, the task is even more difficult.

While the lead cars sped away at the front, Mat was just trying to survive, picking off cars only after long struggles over many laps.  Usually a caution or two helps keep the faster cars in contact with the leaders, but the race this night went 37 laps before the first caution, with mostly single file racing. Mat’s move to the front was compromised by that, ultimately leading to a tenth place finish, which, under the conditions, wasn’t too bad, but it left the driver clearly frustrated, as he had to watch Danny Johnson win the race on the last lap.

Mat, reacting to the events of the evening, declared, “I’ve got one word to describe it- horrible. The car was good. I felt really good, but when it gets rubber down like it was, there’s minimal passing. I don’t know what it is, whether the street stocks running the American Racers (tires) laying the rubber down.  I think they need to grade this place, chop it up a little bit and get rid of that rubber. We can come back next week and have a race.  It’s only May 25^th, and we’re getting rubber down already, and it’s boring racing. Hopefully it’s not like this all year. Getting the water on it later at night (apparently the water truck broke down) and the hot weather might have had something to do with it, but we burned off a right front and a right rear. They’re going to have to do something to make it more competitive, or open up the tire rule and let us run 500s and 400s on the left rear, the right front, and the right rear. They’ll have to so something to make it a race track or the fans are going to stop coming.”

As for the race itself, Mat continued, “It was tough. We tried running the outside there to go around people, tried to go to the bottom, but nothing was faster than that rubber line, and it’s no fun. That’s not racing. We needed a caution. When it finally came, we stuck it out and ended up with a top ten. The car was good. If the track had been race-able we might have ended up in the top three, maybe even won this thing, but not when it takes rubber that early.”

The good news is that it’s still early in the season and despite the hit in the points, Mat is still very much in the hunt. There’s no time to fret, as it’s back to Merrittville on Saturday.