DUQUOIN, Ill. – They may have been caution-filled to start, but Friday’s micro sprint preliminaries inside the Southern Illinois Center ended up as calm as could be by the end of the night.
Amid flips, thrills and spills behind them, Trey Robb and Ryan Timms proved to be the masters of the sixth-mile ‘Mini Magic Mile’ dirt oval, winning their respective 15-lap Dash for Cash events and locking in front-row starting spots for Saturday’s Shamrock Classic micro-sprint finale.
The pair picked up $150 apiece by leading from wire to wire in the two dashes, which set the front nine rows of the starting grid for the Saturday finale.
Robb was simply dominant all night long. He won his heat race by more than a straightaway, then started on the pole for the first dash and never looked back after that.
Not even a caution with three laps left, for a spun Dylan Kadous in turn three, could keep Robb from pulling away to victory by 1.432 seconds over Scotty Milan.
Alex Burgener, Brady Bacon and Andy Bishop filled out the top five in the first Dash for Cash.
“These D1 cars roll great anywhere we go, but especially on flat tracks,” Robb said. “The (Tulsa) Shootout, Circus City (Speedway), here … they’re just hooked up and we were able to show it tonight.
“We had three restarts in my heat and they let me get to the lead (from fourth) coming off turn two every time, so I don’t know what more we could have asked for,” Robb added. “You just had to stay locked around the bottom. Hopefully tomorrow, the track will widen out and we can get two lanes of racing going, but for what we had to work with tonight it was certainly good to us.”
The second Dash for Cash took five tries to get going, with a series of shaky starts that were called back repeatedly by flagman-for-the-night Levi Jones, but once action got underway there was no stopping Ryan Timms.
Timms, 13, led all the way to win the caution-free affair by a half second over Laydon Pearson.
Michael Brummitt, Chad Elliott and Joe B. Miller crossed the line third through fifth in the second dash.
“What’s crazy is that we were fast, and the car has been acting up,” Timms noted. “It was acting up in my heat, and we thought we got it fixed, but even in spite of the issues it was still fast enough to do what we needed to do all night.
“I spun it in hot laps … just wasn’t expecting turn one to be such a tight corner, but once we got it back going in the right direction it was good enough to get us on the front row,” he added. “If we can get a few of these bugs sorted out, maybe we can go out and challenge Trey for that win tomorrow night.”
Bacon, Robb, Bishop, Miller, Aiden Purdue and Timms all won their respective heat races.
While there were no major incidents in either dash, the six heats featured four cars that ended up either upside down or on their sides. All drivers involved walked away without injury.
The remainder of the field that did not transfer through heat races will have one more shot to race their ways into the field through a sequence of last chance races on Saturday afternoon, prior to the finale.
Saturday’s Shamrock Classic program will also feature a full slate of heat races, qualifiers, last chance races and a 50-lap, $5,000-to-win main event for the NOS Energy Drink USAC National Midget Series.
The finishes:
Dash 1 (15 laps): Trey Robb, Scotty Milan, Alex Burgener, Brady Bacon, Andy Bishop, Zach Hubbard, Alex Midkiff, Dylan Kadous, Andrew Cockman.
Dash 2 (15 laps): Ryan Timms, Laydon Pearson, Michael Brummitt, Chad Elliott, Joe B. Miller, Jordan Clary, Aiden Purdue, James Scott, Mariah Ede.