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HEARTBREAK: Vic Coffey was so close to his first-ever World of Outlaws Late Model Series triumph last Friday night at Fayetteville (N.C.) Motor Speedway, he could taste it.
So when the 2008 WoO LMS Rookie of the Year relinquished his race-long lead thanks to a flat right-rear tire coming down to the white flag, the sweetness of victory turned immediately into a sick feeling in his stomach.
“I wanted to throw up,” Coffey said when asked how he reacted when the worn-through tire caused his Sweeteners Plus Rocket to slow with just over one lap remaining in the 50-lap A-Main. “To lose it at the bitter end like that – man, it’s just hard to take.
“These things (WoO LMS events) are hard enough to even put yourself in position to have a shot at winning. A lot of times you’re just happy to qualify, so you hate to see a chance to win slip through your fingers.”
Coffey, who scored one of his two WoO LMS career-best finishes of fourth last year at Fayetteville, fell to 22nd in the final rundown because he didn’t make it to the checkered after tangling with Josh Richards in turn two. The 37-year-old from Caledonia, N.Y., said he got a bit low in turn two while fighting to maintain control of his car and collected Richards, who ended up hooked together with Coffey and tumbled from third place to 23rd.
DRAMATIC CHANGE: Richards went from a commanding points lead to playing catch-up in the blink of an eye at Fayetteville.
Yes, the four-tenths-mile oval’s wild final lap was a shot in the gut to the 21-year-old star from Shinnston, W.Va.
A solid third for the entire distance, Richards, who entered the event leading the WoO LMS points standings, backed off in the closing laps to conserve his tires in hopes of maintaining the show position. With many of his championship rivals struggling, he saw a golden opportunity to pad his 16-point edge.
But then Coffey slowed in front of Richards with the white flag flying. Richards tried to go underneath Coffey in turn two but ran out of room, leaving the two cars stricken on the inside of the corner as the race ended.
“I slowed down to get under Vic, but he was going so slow and we just got caught together,” said Richards, shaking his head. “I was just out there trying to save my tires at the end because I knew we could take advantage of a lot of guys (in the points battle) having bad nights, but it didn’t work out.”
If Richards had cleanly passed Coffey to finish second, he would have pushed his points lead to nearly 40 points and put many drivers in deep holes. Instead, he fell to third in the points standings behind Shane Clanton and Darrell Lanigan, and the rankings tightened to the point that just 66 points separated first from eighth.
Richards’s weekend didn’t get better on Saturday night at Virginia Motor Speedway. After a heat-race tangle with Coffey damaged his car’s nose and forced him to use a provisional spot to start the A-Main, he finished a quiet 13th and headed home third in the points standings, 24 markers behind Lanigan.
FRONT-ROW SEAT: Former WoO LMS regular Dale McDowell benefited handsomely from Fayetteville’s last-lap mayhem, vaulting from a likely sixth-place finish to runner-up money.
The jam-up caused by Coffey’s slow car allowed McDowell to sneak NASCAR star Clint Bowyer’s machine by Chris Madden and Dennis ‘Rambo’ Franklin on the backstretch. He hesitated for a moment rounding turns three and four thinking a caution was out, but he realized that the race would end under a caution/checkered condition because the last lap had begun and the Coffey/Richards incident did not present a safety issue.
“I’d actually backed off in three and four, but I saw (the starter) waving the caution and the checkered so I went ahead and throttled back up,” said McDowell, whose. “I know the rule, but I just wasn’t thinking. Madden got up alongside me, and we both throttled up and drag-raced to the finish.
“We just got a little luck, but we also had bad luck drawing seventh (for the A-Main) so I guess everything evened out.”
FAST AT FAYETTEVILLE: Jeff Smith’s home in Dallas, N.C., is a three-hour drive from Fayetteville, but he’s an adopted son of the 39-year-old track.
“This track has been so good to me over the years,” Smith said after taking advantage of Coffey’s misfortune to register his first career WoO LMS victory. “I don’t know if I have a niche here, or if I’m just lucky, but we’ve won a lot of races at this track – and this one ranks right up there at the top.”
Smith, 43, is off to a good start in his first full season driving for Star Leasing’s Mark Menscer, whose grandfather, Big Al Menscer, is a former racer who was one of the 50 original members of NASCAR. The number 18 on Smith’s car is the same one used by Big Al during his racing days.
HE’S SMILING: No one had a better weekend than Chris Madden, who followed his third-place finish at Fayetteville with a dominant victory at VMS.
Madden, who has five career WoO LMS wins (at least one in each of the past four years), was hampered during February’s Alltel DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia Speedway in Barberville, Fla., by the broken hand he suffered in a late-January incident at Golden Isles Speedway in Brunswick, Ga. But since he healed up, he’s been rolling.
“This is the best I’ve ever started a season in my career by far,” said Madden. “Usually I don’t win races until late-April/early-May, and I think I’ve already won five this year.
“It’s all about hard work – the guys working hard during the week and being prepared. And having Scott (Bloomquist, the dirt Late Model legend and car builder) in my corner is a great advantage.”
Madden ran the first half of the WoO LMS in 2007 and proved to be a serious contender wherever he raced, but he had to drop off as a regular following the premature birth of his son (now a healthy toddler approaching the age of two) and other issues. He still hopes to put together a program to take on the tour fulltime in the future.
“Right now I don’t have the financial backing and the guys that it takes to do it,” the 33-year-old Madden said of the WoO LMS. “The guys who help me have jobs, so it’s hard to just up and leave and stay gone for three weeks or a month at a time.
“But I’ve only been doing this for 13 years, and a lot of these other guys have been racing for 25-plus years. So I still have time to do (the WoO LMS) someday.”
