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two straight Jack Pine wins in his resume, and is definitely the dominant LOL FF.
The final National group of the day saw the F500s of Darrel Greening and Steve Jondal trade the lead virtually every lap, until Greening led the last two laps to win by the official margin of 0.000 seconds (inches at the checker). The 9 Vees stayed in a tight pack early until both Larry Campbell and Helmut Friedrich dropped out of the draft. Then Dave Bowman dropped back with well worn tires which led to his retirement after 13 laps. In the meantime, Don Erickson got out of shape exiting turn 3, forcing Jay Dekko off course to the outside in a cross country drive, which took him all the way to turn 4. Dekko recovered for a 5th place finish and could bring himself to smile about it the next day. On the last lap Bruce Livermore got a run on Bob Lybarger out of turn 8, which carried him into the lead braking for turn 10, and he outran Bob to the checker with Ethan Shippert a close 3rd. The popular closed wheel enduro finished off the day’s festivities, with Norm Nelson (EP Nissan) leading 25 other cars to a narrow victory over Damon Bosell’s ITE Mustang. Ten classes were represented with 20 of 26 starters running at the finish, with 10 on the lead lap. That evening we had a grand time cooking steaks with the D. Wagners, Kevin Hummel and family joining up with the Schaller entourage on the shores of Gull Lake. The next morning Kathy Maleck made a successful return from the oven-like heat of Texas, and made me promise not to write that the only reason John was racing was to update his SCCA license so he could drive a Mercedes "chase" car at the F1 race at Indy, so I said I wouldn’t.
On Labor Day the weathermen finally made amends with a beautiful sunny
day, and almost two-thirds of the National cars stuck around for a great day of racing. Gerry Tussing won another Vintage race; Schaller suffered suspension failure and DeNault won the open-wheel race, with Steve Beck FC winner and second overall. Jeff Meister made up for his tough National finish to win FF going away, Jondal was the lone F500 finisher and winner, Bruce Drenth edged Alan Murray in CFF and Don Erickson won FV. Jerry Szykulski suffered yet another engine problem when Dan Bruggeman took his car out for a couple laps in morning warmup. A disgruntled Jerry packed up the car and headed south, but Bruggeman turned in a fine drive in his Citation to finish 3rd in FF just behind Scott Hutchison. Gerry Curtis drove his Panoz GT1 to a solid win over a twenty car closed wheel group with Doug Sherwood’s GT3 Mazda and Tom Koetter’s AS Trans/Am next. Steve Dahl topped the largest group in that race winning ITB. Finally Lars Lindell topped a close dice with Gary Jensen and Dave Watson to win SRF and everyone went home with at least a little sunburn.
Three weeks later those who didn’t head to Indy for F1 were back at Brainerd for the season ending Regionals. We missed the good September weather by a couple days and my weather notes for the first session Saturday read "cold as hell". That would translate to about 40 damp degrees, but at least it wasn’t snowing! On a brighter note, for the first weekend of this year I got my car running on all four cylinders, primarily due to sending one of my carburetors off to Tom Andresen for first aid. Tom discovered some problems both subtle and obvious, and suddenly I had more top end plus the car would run through the corners. By Saturday race time things had warmed slightly and Mike Lord ran his new Van Diemen away from everyone to win our group by
almost a minute. Chuck Snyder was second in his FM and I was able to nip Jeff Lewis by about a foot and a half in FF. Bruce Drenth hammered the 4 car CFF field and Don Erickson won FV over "ringers" Jeff Gadbois (who rented Dave Bowman’s car for the weekend) and Steve Thomson (or is that "Thomas") who was shaking down Leslie’s Laser, but took a few trips into the scenery in the process. Saturday night we had a late dinner with Lars Lindell at the Black Bear and when we came out the frost was already heavy on the windshield. Lars was back in town shaking down the Jeff Beck RUNOFFS car, and won both SRF races in the process. The overnight low hit 26 degrees, but there was some warm sunshine when we got to the track, and we didn’t pop a frost plug out of the block. I bolted on my better BLC cylinder head for Sunday, and the Swift was running in top form, but Lord still ruled our group by over 20 seconds with Kevin Hummel’s Vector FC second, while we were third overall. Bruce Drenth won his FIFTH straight CFF race for the year with Erickson a repeat winner in FV. I did not get full results for the weekend, but the High Performance Car Control Clinic added over 20 cars to the anemic Regional group and gave the event a fighting chance to break even. Our thanks to Jimmy Griggs and his instructor crew for putting this program together, and hopefully it will add both members and drivers to our events in coming years. Further thanks to all the staff who passed on Indy and made our event possible. And finally my thanks to Lynn Anderson for putting me down for press credentials at the RUNOFFS. Unfortunately, due to job commitments I was unable to attend this year. From what I understand a snowmobile suit would have been suitable spectator apparel on Sunday at Mid Ohio, but I’m sure Lynn will have a full report in this issue.
Tonneau On-Line November 2000
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Copyright 2000, Land O'Lakes Region Last revised: March 13, 2003
