ROSSBURG, Ohio - Austin Dillon left the rest of the field in his dust to win NASCAR’s return to dirt racing in the Truck Series race at Eldora Speedway.
Dillon pulled away in the green-white-checkered finish Wednesday night to complete a thrilling return to the muck of the clumpy dirt track.
“This is real racing right here,” said Dillon, a regular in the Nationwide Series.
The last time one of NASCAR’s top touring series competed on dirt was Sept. 30, 1970, when Richard Petty won a Sprint Cup - called the Grand National Division at that time - race at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh.
That drought ended with racing that started early in the day and bled into late night at the Tony Stewart-owned half-mile track.
Ken Schrader, 58, became the oldest pole winner in a NASCAR series when he won a qualifying heat race.
NASCAR returned to dirt in an attempt to reconnect with its roots and give fans raised on asphalt and stock cars a taste of the slides and wall-banging that are staples of the surface.
It looks like NASCAR will have to come back.
Fans packed the track that opened in 1954, a rare feat for a series that often runs in front of mostly empty grandstands as a support race in a Sprint Cup weekend. About 20,000 fans spread out on the grassy hills or creaky wooden bleachers. They camped out along the street entering the track and turned Eldora into the site of Ohio’s biggest party.
Not bad considering rural Rossburg had a population of 201 in the 2010 census.
They watched quite a show. The trucks skidded and slid around the track and mashed and bashed against the wall and each other, living up to the hype of one of the most anticipated races of the season in any NASCAR series.
Kyle Larson was second, Ryan Newman third, Joey Coulter fourth and Brendan Gaughan fifth. Darrell Wallace Jr. finished seventh.
“If I can get the dirt out of my eyes, I’ll be all right,” Wallace said, rubbing his eyes at the podium.
Jared Landers of Batesville, a touring dirt late model driver making his first Truck Series start, won his heat race and started second. He was involved in a crash in the last segment and finished 12th.
Stewart, a three-time Cup champion, was on hand to take care of every last detail of the track he bought in 2004. Reigning Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski and Clint Bowyer also were on hand. Cup drivers Newman and Dave Blaney were in the 30-truck field.
“It was fun out there, no doubt,” Newman said.
There seemed to be more excitement for the Truck Series race than the Cup stop Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The track issued 130 media credentials and boasted that tickets were purchased from 48 of the 50 states.
Eldora hosts some of the largest dirt racing events in the country, including the Dream, Kings Royal and World 100.
Qualifying was pulled out of the dirt racing playbook. There were five, eight-lap qualifying events and a 15-lap last-chance race to come up with the 30 competitors (regularly 36 in the series) for the 150-lap Mudsummer Classic. The feature race was broken into three segments of 60, 50 and 40 laps.
Norm Benning rode the wall in the last-chance race to become the final driver in the field, but his No. 57 Chevrolet looked as if it went through 150 laps, not 15, with the exhaust pipes dragging along the dirt.
It was a good race for older drivers. Schrader had a lap of 91.329 mph on the half-mile dirt track to take the top starting spot. Dick Trickle was 57 years old when he won the pole for the June 1999 Nationwide Series race at Dover.
Sports, Pages 22 on 07/25/2013