Joey Saldana Eyes His First Series Win
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Feb 14, 2008
One of the toughest feats to accomplish with the Advance Auto Parts World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series is for a driver to sweep a night of racing. A clean sweep consists of setting fast time, winning a heat race, winning the Crane Cams Dash and also being victorious in the A-Feature to end the night.
Joey Saldana accomplished this once last year at River Cities Speedway in North Dakota and nearly did it at Pike County Speedway last March, as he set fast time, won the Crane Cams Dash and led all 35-laps of the A-Feature event. The only blemish on his ledger was a second-place run in the first heat race. He even began the night by turning the fastest lap in practice of the 30 cars that took to the track. He held off a hard charge by two-time defending series champion Donny Schatz late in the race.
Saldana will have another chance to accomplish this on February 16, as the Advance Auto Parts World of Outlaws pay a visit to the high-banked 3/8-mile track located in Magnolia, Mississippi. He rated the facility as one of the most challenging the series visits all season long.
“It’s a tough track to get around, “ said Saldana, who pilots the Budweiser/Open Joist Mopar JEI. “You have to really have your car working well. It definitely can get slick and you have to put your car in a position to be up front. The racing is usually pretty good there. Hopefully we can be up front again this year. It’s always a racy track and a good show for the fans.”
In his career at Pike County Speedway, Saldana has three Top-10 finishes, including his dominating performance last year. In his first visit to the track in 1996, he turned in a very solid seventh-place performance. While the track surface at the high-banked 3/8-mile is different than most of the other tracks that the Advance Auto Parts World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series visits during the season, Saldana finds it comparable to Volusia Speedway Park in Florida, where he competed for six consecutive nights last week in the Alltel DIRTcar Nationals, with there being a sandy complexion to the surface at both facilities.
“You have different clay down here and they try to work on the track to keep moisture in it, “ he explained. “It’s hard to do when there is a lot of sand in the track. That’s why at the end of the race, it can get pretty touchy on tires. Often you have to be in the right place at the right time, and that’s often the characteristics of sand-type tracks.”
