Dirt Racing’s Winning Moment: Home-state driver Cade Dillard scored his 20th career United States Modified Touring Series win at Ark-La-Tex Speedway in Vivian, La. Thursday night (March 30), holding off spirited charges from Rodney Sanders and Jim Chisholm inside the final 10 laps.
Dillard’s win came on the first of three scheduled nights for the USMTS as part of Ark-La-Tex’s annual Cajun Clash.
Dirt Racing’s Dramatic Moment: Dillard’s win came within inches of not happening. With 10 laps to go in Thursday’s 35-lap A-main, veteran Sanders got alongside Dillard and came within inches of taking the lead at the start/finish line. Lapped traffic in turn 1 forced Sanders off his preferred lower line into lapped traffic and forced a mistake, with Sanders spinning himself out in turn 3 trying to keep up with Dillard.
What Dirt Racing Fans’ll Be Group Chatting About This Morning
It’s been more than six years since my last visit to the Ark-La-Tex Speedway and I firmly enjoyed the visit, namely for having chairback seating and because it was one of the raciest surfaces I’ve seen for factory stock racecars. The surface was again racy on Thursday night and seeing improvements to the track (new pit grandstands and suites) is a welcome sight. Vivian’s track is a diamond in the rough.
Fresh off a heat race win, Jason Hughes was blunt with Racin’ Dirt, noting that winning a heat race from the pole still could mean racing a B-main and that he needed to learn how to properly sandbag to deal with the invert and passing points that continue to plague USMTS’s race programs. The USMTS field of cars is too deep to be utilizing gimmickry to blend the field up. It does no one any good to hear competitors openly admitting they need to slow down to better position themselves on race night.
Not unexpectedly, a post made by the Ark-La-Tex Speedway to their Facebook page prior to Thursday night’s race was not well-received by many fans.
It’s not unheard of for tracks to assess a fee for fans to bring in coolers, and I would consider a track that previously didn’t allow coolers to give fans the option. But a $20 fee for said coolers is self-defeating. It either comes off, as a commenter put it, a means to ensure people won’t actually bring coolers, or creates a situation where fans that opt to bring coolers are going to stay 20 feet away from the concessions stand. If I’ve spent $20 to bring a cooler in,…
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