Back Home Again in Belleville ’07 Part 2
By Chris W. Lovett
Jason Leffler got his only Midget Nationals Championship in 1997 and kept a ten year streak of no repeat winners alive. Steve Knepper who served as Grand Marshal this year and was inducted into the High Banks Hall of Fame and Museum in 2001 ended the streak with a repeat of his 1988 Championship in a John Lawson owned midget in 1998. At the time Knepper was one of only three people to record two Midget Nationals Championships and to date no one has recorded more than two.
Leffler’s lone championship night victory was flawless but his preliminary victory was not without blemish. Early in the race Shane Scully sat on the pole as a result of his victory in the dash and led the 25 lap event while Leffler sat in third behind Willoughby teammate Jay Drake. In a sweeping move Leffler moved past Drake and challenged Scully entering turn three with the two making contact in the process. The end result was Scully taking his first of two vicious tumbles on the Highbanks and Drake hitting the turn three guardrail in his effort to avoid Scully’s flipping car. From that point forward Leffler was unstoppable winning both his preliminary feature event and the 40 lap finale on Saturday.
To put the field of cars and talent assembled for the 2007 Midget Nationals in perspective consider these facts: Forty of the 43 cars that qualified were within a second of Coon’s mark. On Friday three out of four heats went non-stop and the only red flag of the evening didn’t occur until lap seventeen of the 25 lap preliminary feature. In fact there were only two red flags on the entire weekend with the second one occurring on lap nineteen of the 40 lap finale when Ricky Stenhouse and Cody Brewer tangoed in turn three. All of this with sixteen rookies in the field and anybody wanting to make the argument that the field of cars assembled for the 2007 Nationals was the finest ever had plenty of ammo.
All non-racing pageantry was done away with on Saturday night due to a forecast that pretty much guaranteed rain to arrive around 10:30 pm. USAC tried with no success to shorten the semi main to ten laps and thankfully for all involved the event went non-stop. The only formality on the evening was a quick four-abreast salute and the obligatory turn one fireworks. The forecast turned out to be accurate, rare in my neck of the woods, as rain began to fall just before the final re-start on lap 33 at 10:15.
Even Mother Nature couldn’t kill the great mood that surrounded the 2007 Midget Nationals and she was not able to deny Coons his second National’s Crown in three years which turned out to be the first for the Wilke-Pak team for which he drove. The rain that fell at dawn Saturday morning, again at 11:00 AM, and during the waning laps of Saturday’s finale did not dampen the racing or the good times leading up to and following the event. The countdown to another return trip to Belleville began even as campsites were dismantled Sunday morning in a continual downpour.
Random Notes:
Brad Loyet continued a theme running through his ’07 season by flipping in turn four on lap 17 of the feature on Friday after climbing over a slowing Don Droud Jr. Loyet also flipped between turns three and four at McCool Junction on Wednesday. Both the Belleville and McCool flips were tame in comparison to the ride he went for at Knoxville which left him on the sidelines with arm injuries. On Friday neither Lewis car made it out of its heat into the feature. Davey Ray managed to transfer out of the Semi but Dave Darland required a provisional when his car didn’t take off on the initial start of the semi and was pushed back into the pits. Ray managed an eighth and Darland a tenth in the 25 lap prelim which would be their best finish in a feature event during this Midget Nationals weekend. As a result the Toyota billboard on the back straight of the Highbanks was the best exposure the new entry into the midget motor world received at this year’s Nationals. The Kahne team cars of Kevin Swindell and Brady Bacon also struggled through the weekend. Bacon ended the weekend with a thirteenth and Swindell was right behind him in fourteenth in the finale. On Friday Johnny Rodriguez set a torrid pace but was dogged continuously by Coons Jr. Finally Coons nabbed the lead with a pass on the low side of turn four on lap 15 and stretched his lead to a half straightaway by the time the checkered flag fell 10 laps later. Rodriguez is just a heartbeat away from his first Midget Nationals crown with his performances in just the past five years. Ricky Stenhouse continued his string of great performances by finishing third to become the highest finishing Tony Stewart Racing team car on Friday. Stenhouse crashing into a flipping Cody Brewer right after taking second on Saturday was a heart breaker and left teammate Levi Jones to take second for the Chevy powered team that held the top two positions in 2006 with Mopar power. Anyone wanting to see just how lucky Stenhouse and Brewer were to walk away from their grinding crash as well as how breathtaking the racing was should order the DVD from Mills Video Productions -http://www.millsvideoproductions.com/ All track records were safe with the exception of one. When the fifteen lap Saturday night semi main that USAC wanted to shorten to ten laps went non-stop it broke Dean Erfurth’s 8/8/87 mark of 5:11.55. Given the age of the record it’s probably safe to say that there hasn’t been a fifteen lap midget race that has gone non-stop since Erfurth set the old mark. Gary Taylor who won the Saturday night semi main will be the new 15 lap record holder at a time of 4:42.49. Jon Backlund’s 8/6/88 four lap mark of 1:07.83 is now the oldest record still standing and might last a while when you consider that the time requires an average lap of seventeen seconds flat. The current one lap mark stands at 17.502 set by ’97 champ Leffler one year after his championship on 7/30/98. Mopar was again the title sponsor for the Midget Nationals for the second straight year and in addition to their prominence as such they once again claimed the championship as the Wilke-Pak Spike Coons chauffeured was powered by a Mopar.
