The fifth race of the 2022 Superstar Racing Experience (SRX) season, held at I-55 Raceway, was dominated by Tony Stewart for his third dirt win in as many tries. In the process, SRX experienced more of the same issues they had last year on dirt, while also highlighting some other ones in the series.
I can appreciate the idea of trying to get every driver to finish every race if they have a reasonable issue under caution. However, sometimes SRX really needs to just throw its hands up and give up on sinking ships.
Hailie Deegan had an engine issue right before the field was coming back to green, which extended the caution period for several laps and took a lot of green flag laps off the board. After spending a number of minutes trying to get Deegan’s engine cooled down, SRX finally went back racing with just 18 laps to go in the main event. Keep in mind the caution initially came out for debris some 20 laps earlier.
Somehow, that wasn’t the final caution of the night. The last 10 laps (in which only green flag laps count) had five yellows, primarily because Ryan Hunter-Reay and Tony Kanaan kept wrecking each other in the back. That could have led to some exciting restarts but Tony Stewart was so far above everybody else in the field in dirt racing. The only two drivers near his level either had a damaged race car (Ryan Newman) or were 67 years old (Ken Schrader).
The good news is it was a whale of a battle behind Stewart on all of those restarts. But does it really matter that much when the leader is a second ahead after one green flag lap? The good news is next week should give Stewart more competition; Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott are NASCAR Cup Series drivers in their prime who may be able to close the gap in experience Stewart has over them in dirt.
To me, though it’s clear a potential season three of SRX cannot have dirt racing. There are just so many more great asphalt tracks in this country like Slinger Superspeedway or Salem Speedway or Elko Speedway to have these drivers compete on. Even a mess like Bowman-Gray Stadium would hold better events for this series, in my opinion, than dirt ovals do.
In other news, Marco Andretti finished a very impressive second. It’s his third straight runner-up finish this year in the features and has allowed him to claim the points lead with just one race remaining. It’s becoming harder and harder to write Andretti off from stock cars; he’s been actively campaigning for a while now to get a ride…
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