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Tag: Super Cup Stock Car Series

  • Driver Ego: The Key to Building a Successful Racing Series

    Driver Ego: The Key to Building a Successful Racing Series

    The Stephen Cox Blog is Presented by McGunegill Engine Performance

    The easiest way to increase car count in short track racing and amateur road racing is to keep your drivers happy. Really happy. Fortunately, there is a very effective and affordable way to do that.

    It was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, August 29, 2004. It was blazing hot at the Hallett Motor Racing Circuit just outside of Tulsa. Although we missed the setup and were posting slower-than-usual lap times, we won the GT-2 qualifying race after the leader retired with a broken supercharger belt.

    I climbed out of the race car drenched in sweat, knowing that I’d won a race I didn’t deserve. The track owner, the late Mike Stephens, was setting up victory lane and preparing to hand out trophies to the day’s winners. I stopped by to chat with him just before the main event and jokingly asked which trophy was mine. Mike laughed and then responded with some of the most truthful words ever uttered in motorsports.

    “Stephen, I’m not in the racing business. I’m in the ego gratification business. I promise we’ll take care of you.”  

    World Racing League championship ring

    The racing driver in me doesn’t like to hear that, but it’s true. Drivers want to participate in events that reward their ego. They’re interested in events that leave behind detailed records so that future generations can see and recognize their efforts.

    Records matter. Even the small ones. Heat race wins, track records, qualifying race wins, entry lists… these things are important to many racing drivers. They want to know that the series keeps careful records that will be made widely available and preserved long after their careers are over.

    Some may call this nothing more than childish ego. Your drivers and teams will consider it an honest, justifiable pride in years of hard work. But ultimately, what we think doesn’t really matter because human nature remains the same.

    The World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series is now re-writing their record book to include drivers who won A-main races during multi-day events. Previously, drivers who had won feature races on anything other than the final night of the event weren’t credited with official wins. Now they are. This brings a host of new, officially recognized winners into the record books. It makes a lot of drivers and teams very happy, and it didn’t cost the World of Outlaws a cent.

    World Racing League president Joey Todd offers a championship ring to the winners of the U. S. Endurance Championship at the Circuit of the Americas every December. Almost every racing driver I’ve ever met would trade all the trophies and accolades he’d ever earned for just one championship ring.

    It’s also a smart public relations move because a ring is worn regularly and continues to advertise for the series for decades to come. Championship rings hold a special mystique. Nobody gets a ring for participation. Few people will ask about a trophy after it disappears into a closet, but everyone wants to know, “Hey, how did you get that ring?”

    Midvale Speedway has begun posting the names of their track record holders on the front page of their website. It gives drivers something to shoot for. It shows that the series is interested in promoting their own teams and recognizing achievement at their track. It’s a great move that costs the track nothing.

    Every racing series and local track should have a master record book that is digitally distributed at no charge to the racing media, permanently posted on the series website and sent to every online racing database after each season. It should include every team and driver possible, and every record imaginable.

    It costs nothing to include short track heat race wins, track records and class champions in your record book, but your teams and drivers will take notice. They will appreciate the recognition.

    For better or worse, I really believe that Mike Stephens was right. We’re not in the racing business. We’re in the ego gratification business.

    Stephen Cox

    Sopwith Motorsports Television Productions

    Driver, FIA EPCS sports cars and Super Cup Stock Car Series

    Co-host, Mecum Auctions on NBCSN

  • Cox Wins From Last Spot on Starting Grid in Super Cup Title Chase

    Cox Wins From Last Spot on Starting Grid in Super Cup Title Chase

    Submitted by Global Media, Midvale, Ohio (June 4, 2017) – Stephen Cox charged from last place on the grid to win the second of Saturday night’s Skipco Auto Auction Twin 50s presented by United Tire & Service at Ohio’s Midvale Speedway, the first stop on the Super Cup Stock Car Series national tour.

    After his STA-BIL 360 Performance / McGunegill Engine Performance #21 was sidelined with mechanical issues earlier in the day, Cox jumped into the #7 Codie Rohrbaugh Racing machine when driver and pole sitter Larry Berg graciously gave up the seat.

    Cox, who holds the official Super Cup track record at Midvale, began working his way forward under the guidance of spotter Thomas Rohrbaugh and crew chief Codie Rohrbaugh.

    “They had to slow me down a few times early in the race,” Cox said after the victory. “The brakes on this car were very different from mine, and I was driving it too deep into the corners until I got a feel for it. Tom and Codie really saved the race by slowing me down and backing up my corner entry. Once I did that and adjusted my entry line a bit, the car was just a rocket ship.”

    Cox moved from dead last to second by the midway point of the 50-lap event, trailing veteran driver Jim Crabtree, Jr. Leaving the rest of the field behind, the two cars began a long struggle that would end when Cox slipped underneath Crabtree in Turn Three, just eight laps from the checkered flag.

    “Jim drove a great race and ran cleanly with me all night,” Cox continued. “He was trying high and low lines but I could see his car getting loose off the corners. Josh and Rick and Frank and all the guys on my crew had worked so hard all night and I knew my car would stick on the bottom. There wasn’t a car in the field that would stay with us off Turn Four.”

    Cox went from last place to first place to secure his first win in the Super Cup series, adding this to an oval track victory record that already included the Mid American Stock Car Series, dirt cars, open wheel modifieds and the original, Indiana-based CARS series. The win keeps him in contention for the Super Cup national short track championship which continues in two weeks at Kingsport, Tennessee.

    The Midvale winner is also slated to compete this winter in Europe’s Electric GT Championship road racing series as well as selected American road course events late this season.

  • Richard Petty, Third Place & the Night the Track Fell Apart

    Richard Petty, Third Place & the Night the Track Fell Apart

    Stephen Cox Blog is Presented by McGunegill Engine Performance

    My only race at West Virginia’s Ona Speedway was with the Super Cup Stock Car Series on June 2, 2012. Driving for J. J. Pack, we had a strong race car and finished a very respectable third in only my second series start.

    I was really happy with third until I learned that the two cars ahead of me were accused of illegally soaking their tires. This could have made me the first legal car across the finish line. Head slap. Now, of course, third place seems terrible. It’s like going to the cinema to enjoy “Captain America” only to find out later that Scarlett Johansson was sitting behind you the whole time.

    Nevertheless, I was pleased to drive Ona because I’d heard that The King himself, Richard Petty, had raced there in the 1960’s. So naturally, when Petty showed up at last week’s Mecum auction in Houston (which I co-host for NBCSN), I asked him if he remembered racing at “West Virginia International Speedway,” as it was then known.

    Oh, yeah. We won up there at least a couple of times. It’s been the 1960’s since I was there… maybe the early 70’s. I ran it as both dirt and asphalt.”

    Petty laughed out loud when he continued, “It was dirt, to begin with, and then the boys come in and asphalted it and when they did they just left the dirt and put the asphalt on top. We got halfway through the race and the whole track had moved, you know? They had to dig it back up and fix it. They didn’t put no gravel down or nothing, they just laid the asphalt on the same dirt.”

    When I got home after the auction, I called up my old broadcasting pal, Ken Martin, who now works in NASCAR’s historical archives and asked him if he’d ever heard of such a crazy thing. Martin’s first response was, “If Petty said it, I believe it.” He then did what archivists always do… shuffle around in dusty old books and miraculously find the exact ancient document that confirms the whole story, which turned out to be entirely true.

    It happened on August 18, 1963. The Mountaineer 300 is still listed in NASCAR’s records as having taken place in Huntington, West Virginia. In reality, the newly-paved facility was located in a broad valley near the village of Ona, about ten minutes west of Huntington on Highway 60. Petty remembered it as being “off on the left in some valley, in the middle of nowhere.”

    An astounding 16,000 stock car fans showed up at the .375-mile bullring to see only twenty cars. Richard Petty qualified inside the second row behind pole sitter Fred Lorenzen and Jack Smith. The field also included NASCAR legends Ned Jarrett, Joe Weatherly, Buck Baker, Wendell Scott and Junior Johnson. Petty held the lead for much of the early going but eventually faded to tenth as the track began to come apart, especially in Turns 1 and 2.

    Ona Speedway today (credit: Ona Speedway, used by permission)

    My tires were getting bald and chunks of pavement didn’t make that problem any better,” Lorenzen told a newspaper reporter after passing Weatherly on lap 198 to win the race. “I knew I had a big lead, so I slowed up the last fifty laps. I had to concentrate on missing the holes and the loose chunks of pavement.”

    Fifty-four years later Ona Speedway is a battered old warhorse that still provides great short track racing. The track surface is tired and worn out. The adjacent airfield provides most of the property’s revenue and keeps the race track financially viable. The grandstands now hold perhaps 2,500 fans instead of the 16,000 that turned out to watch the first Mountaineer 300.

    But that’s precisely why I love Ona Speedway. The track layout still covers the exact same ground. The basic layout hasn’t changed since 1963. History echoes from every corner of the track. It requires almost no imagination whatsoever to sit in the stands and hear Petty’s ’63 Plymouth roaring into Turn 1, dodging chunks of loose asphalt along the way.

    Every year more of our old, historic race tracks are replaced by shopping malls, parking garages and apartment complexes. And, for better or worse, our once-great short track racing has been replaced with green-white-checkered TV shows that three people can win.

    The Mountaineer 300 of 1963 was our racing heritage, and every October it lives on as the Mountaineer 100 for late models. Few people today know of the event’s glorious past.

    The first race of the 2017 campaign at Ona Speedway is scheduled for this weekend, April 15th. Put Ona on your motorsports bucket list. It’s worth the trip.

    And when you get there, remember… I should have won. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

    Stephen Cox
    Sopwith Motorsports Television Productions
    Co-host, Mecum Auctions on NBCSN
    Driver, Super Cup Stock Car Series, Electric GT Championship