T-440

Their racing is fine. However French Grimes seemed to want to be a little dictator, running his kingdom and never working with anyone else.  He seems to be pretty well out of the picture now, so maybe things will improve.  Since there are no local weekly tracks for the Racesaver cars now, they are not much of a factor in western PA racing.  Just a handful of races at Lernerville, Dog Hollow & Bedford.

 

Walt

I don't know if I would call French Grimes a dictator.  He had a rules package, and he required you to follow the rules package if you wanted to race in the Racesaver sprints.  One of those rules was that you run the Racesaver head, if you didn't want to run that head, you could race somewhere else.  He had his rules and he stuck to them.  The Racesaver sprints have grown to become a very popular division.  The Racesaver package is the rules package used by the IMCA, one of the largest sanctioning bodies in the country.  If I remember correctly, it was Mercer that rocked the boat by going with a different head rule for their 305 class, how many tracks does that class race at now?  

Neat little track, saw some really good races there over the years.  Car count and fan count varied like any other track.  For a while when Delisle was running the track, the car count was getting better each week.  When Taylor took over the place, there were a lot of improvements in the track and the grounds, and the place looked really good the last race I was at  it is a shame to see it looking the way it does today in those pictures.  A lot of folks complain about the track being too small for late model racing, but I saw some really good races there.  Like every other track, there were good nights and bad nights for track surface, on the nights it was good, the racing was excellent.  

The current Semi-Late division that continues to grow in this area was born at AMP.  

Personally, I think one of the downfalls the place always had was trying to include every class in the region.  I think if they would have gone with 3 classes, Late Models, Semi-Lates and one of the stock classes, (streets or pures) and tried to corner the market on those 3 classes, they would have done a lot better, as opposed to trying to run the same 5 or 6 classes that every other track in the area was running.  

Thanks for the replies!  I remember when the class was first introduced at AMP, they said the 602 crate motor would be ok to use.  I like the fact that you can buy a crate, or if you prefer, you can build your own engine.  I thought back when the class started, if they kept the shock rule to keep that cost down, and had a reasonable weight rule so teams weren't spending piles of money on light weight parts, it would be a good class for this area.  

I'm anxious to get up to Thunder Mountain or Hummingbird to see this class run.  I think if the bottom end of the purse was raised, the class could really take off.