Macon Speedway Opening Night #66

Well, the first Saturday has come and gone.  The first Saturday means one thing to me, Macon Speedway opening night.  However, 2 of the last 3 years it has been the same night as opening night of the Illini 100 at Farmer City.  When LaSalle ended up getting called off, many fans were still stir crazy and looking for a place to take in some racing action.  It hit me right away that Macon's opening night was the same weekend.  I knew of a group of at least 8 who were looking for a place to go.  They call themselves the United Midwest Drinkers, or UMD for short.  I also ran into some others who came long in far that I knew all to see some racing action at the 1/5 mile high banks of Macon, 1 of which brought his simulator (as he was heading to LaSalle for the Illini as well).  It also was his first trip, and I had a nice long discussion with him about the track and his dad and racing in general. 

 I realized how powerful a tool Facebook was, and created an event and spread the word around to ALL of my fellow racing friends and other places where fans could find out.  I knew that there weren't many tracks racing that weekend, so I would give people the information about one of the venues that would be running.

For the large group of a dozen or so UMD members, many were there for the very first time, which was exciting to me as Macon was the place where it all got started for me.  I knew if the racing was like I know it could be, they would instantly fall in love with the track. 

There was a good field of cars, including 20 Late Models, and a total of 140 cars. The track was a bit slimy to start, but was wet and heavy, and gave us some great heats in all classes.  I made it over to see what they thought of the place after the heats.  They were absolutely hooked, and were in love with the place.  You couldn't have given a much better first impression about a track than that.

The feature of the night for me was the Late Model feature, not taking away from the others.  They just were able to get into lapped traffic longer and slice and dice.  Ryan Unzicker put on a show working through lapped traffic, keeping Cory Daugherty at bay to win his 2nd straight feature at Macon, winning the Lite Beer Twin 50 makeup feature at the end of last year to close out the season.  Other winners were Jeremy Nichols in the Modifieds, holding off stiff competition from Dave Crawley Jr. and former NASCAR Winston Racing Series and UMP Modified National Champion Jeff Leka.  Nick Macklin won in the Sportsman class, while Larry Russell Jr. took home the Street Stock feature, Adam Webb the Pro Hornet feature, and Kyle Maxwell won the Amateur Hornet feature.

After the show I seen a couple of them walking back out to their campers.  I asked them if they enjoyed it and if they would be back.  They said they loved it and would definitely be back this year, which was great to hear.   It wasn't how we all planned to start our season, but we all had a great time watching some great racing, and in the end that's all that matters.