With racing in his area largely shut down after Labor Day, on a whim Carmen and a few buddies venture to the famed Silver Spring Speedway. What transpired got his attention. “I got there and it was like holy cow look at all of these cars and now competitive it is,” he recalls. “That was a big eye opener. I actually went to the scorer‘s tower to get a printed set of rules to see what these cars were. They raced well so I decided to give it a whirl and I got a couple of phone numbers to get a used car. I got a car, and we built an engine for it and went down there.”
The car was known as a super sportsman. Similar to a sprint car it is equipped with a 358 carbureted cast iron block engine. Among those who would compete at Silver Spring were future Hall of Fame drivers Smokey Snellbaker and Kramer Williamson. It was already a tough deal, but even more so when you were getting way out of your comfort zone. “I went down there and got my butt whipped for half of the year,” Carmen says, “You know they ran these little wings, and I was never around the wings. The first night we had the car sitting in the driveway and we just put the wing in the middle.”
While he may have been tossed around in the early going, he eventually got the hang of this new discipline and even scored a win in his first year. His story underscores just how tough it was to get to victory lane. “They did full handicapping there,” he says, “and for a while they did it on a three-race average. On the night of my first win, I was the high handicap guy. Because of that I had to line up 15th for the feature. At Silver Spring you had to be aggressive because there were so many guys. We would get 55 cars on a regular show and the high point guy started last in the heat. They started 11 cars in each heat, and took the top four or five to the feature. You had eight to 10 laps to get there, so you had to learn how to get to the front without tearing stuff up.”
Perigo started getting to the head of the pack on a regular basis and along the way he developed a healthy rivalry with Mark Smith, who continues to race and win today. Carmen thinks this period proved to be good for all concerned. “We drove each other hard,” Carmen says. “We were both rookies the same year and we pitted next to each other for 10 years. We weren‘t buddies. It wasn‘t like we went out to eat together, but we didn‘t have any trouble either. I wanted to beat him, and he really stepped it up at what we called the away tracks. We had a tour and would race at Lincoln, Williams Grove, and Port Royal, and he really excelled at those tracks. He really pushed me to race better there. I was probably a little better than him at Silver Spring, although he did win his share, but I probably pushed him harder there.
I think we stepped it up, and everybody had to play catch up because we were really going at it.”
Just as he had taken to big block modifieds, Perigo quickly found his footing in the Super Sportsman taking track championships at Silver Spring in 1991 and 2001, and in 2009 he was the king at Williams Grove. The closure of Silver Spring in 2005 forced many drivers in this class to look elsewhere, and Path Valley Speedway became an option for many. Perigo was destined to go fast no matter what the rules dictated, but when the wings came off at this high-banked bullring, he really excelled.
In 2014 and 2015 he ran away with the track title, but with typical modesty Perigo suggests that the new style of racing temporarily tipped the scales in his favor. “When they pulled the wings off and we went wingless in all honesty I probably just caught on quicker,” he says, “So I blew out 25 to 30 wins in the first two or three years. Now the rest of the guys like Billy Brian have caught up. In the first couple of races there everyone was kind of tip toeing around, and I was full on go because I watched more of this stuff and had more experience.”
After Perigo had wrapped up his second consecutive Path Valley title a simple conversation at a yearend celebration produced another turn in his racing career. To this day he is nearly incredulous at what went down. “We were at the Path Valley wingless banquet and John Stehman had enjoyed a few drinks,” Carmen says with a laugh. “He sits down, and this was after they had first run the NASCAR Trucks at Eldora and he says that he ought to go out and get a truck and have me drive it. I‘m sitting there thinking it is only one race, and they don‘t look all that fun to me. Then he says we really ought to do this and run all the short tracks.
“I said, John, we can‘t do that. We would need a pit crew and all sorts of stuff, let‘s get a 410 wingless sprint car. He looks up and said, done! Now I think we are both talking out of our butts so on the way home my son asks if we were really getting a 410. I said no, John was drinking. We‘ll be racing a sportsman car next year. Then the phone rings on Sunday afternoon and John asks what are we going to do about this? I said are you serious? He said hell yes, meet me at Zemco Speed Equipment on Monday morning.”
The plans were modest then, and largely have remained so to this day. The goal at first was to concentrate on the USAC Eastern Storm swing, and perhaps work in some other races that made sense. “I never thought I would have the opportunity to drive a wingless 410,” Carmen says, “and I didn‘t want to just jump in at Eastern Storm. I checked out the BOSS series, which I really hadn‘t heard of. I saw they had a race at Fremont, looked at the map and thought we could do that. The first time I was in a 410 car I got fourth in my heat, lined up 15th in the feature and finished second. I almost won it.” Since then, he has scored a BOSS series win at Ohio‘s Atomic Speedway.
He has been realistic throughout it all. He doesn‘t expect to win a USAC National race, not that he won‘t try, but he does feel it is a privilege to compete. As noted above Carmen‘s first appearance in a USAC National win ended with a crash in the semi. The next night at Lincoln he held off the late Bryan Clauson to score his first USAC heat race win. What happened next tells you a lot about Carmen Perigo. After exiting his race car, he walked right over to Clauson and shook his hand. “I told him it was an honor to race with him,” he says. “I was star struck. I was on top of the world. Where a younger guy might be worried about how their car would run in the feature, I‘m thinking I just ran a 410 sprint car race with USAC and I beat Bryan Clauson.”