Combined Waste Sprintcar Jackpot lucky dip crushes Ando and gift’s pole to Veal but McHugh thrilled the crowd almost as much as the three car Wingless Sprint battle did for those who stayed to watch it.
Avalon Raceway’ Season opener for the SRA Sprintcars saw a very solid crowd and a stout field of Sprintcars in action on a newly laid and re-profiled track last night – Saturday October 26th.
A beautiful warm afternoon turned into a not so chilly night and despite the vagaries of a new, untested track surface, the Sprintcar and Wingless Sprint features kept the crowd entertained with Jamie Veal taking the Sprintcar Jackpot from Lockie McHugh and Glen Sutherland while Chirs Temby, Travis Millar and Luke Weel fought out a ding-dong battle in the Wingless Sprint invitational event.
A random draw for qualifying groups and hence heat groups, saw things mixed up with group two of the Sprintcars being a stacked heat/group with McHugh in the Domain Ramsey #2, Veal, Jock Goodyer, Marcus Dumesny and Brett Milburn all in the same group.
The top two cars from each heat then went straight into another randomly drawn – by a select group of kids – pole shuffle.
It was at this point after winning the first heat from Daniel Pestka, that Grant Anderson was allotted the sixth starting spot for the pole shuffle.
Pestka beat Ando off the line but then overcooked the turn two exit and the Albury Ace sped past for the win.
Next, he came up against Sutherland and the exact same thing happened.
For the third go around Ando never got the same opportunity against McHugh who then defeated Corey McCullagh but couldn’t beat Veal, or didn’t want to, maybe hoping for an outside front row start for the feature.
Only seven cars started the B-Main which was won by Bobby Daly from Josh Buckingham. Eddie Lumbar, Michael Cunningham, David Aldersley, David Dennison and Chad Gardner all missed the transfers.
It took a while to get the A-Main started when a first corner shuffle saw Milburn spun around to a stall. After criss-crossing the second half of the grid to account for Milburn going to the rear, Goodyer was then in trouble with Dennis Jones and Peter Doukas, riding some wheels, bouncing and knocking a tyre off the rim amongst other damage.
Finally, we were away with Veal out front of McHugh, McCullagh, Sutherland, Pestka and Ando.
Seven laps in and McHugh spun up in turn two dropping himself to 5th with a lot of work to do. And get to work he did.
The track had settled down to a degree, probably better than it was during the heats and cars were on the top or the bottom or in between.
As Veal was out front McHugh was quicker, picking off Ando on lap 11, Sutherland on lap 17 and then McCullagh two laps later to be back in second place and closing, but with no caution flags he was up against it.
Veal lapped all but the top nine cars almost embarrassing Dumesny as the next victim, to take the win by just over 3 seconds from McHugh, Sutherland, Pestka, Tate Frost, a fading McCullagh, Anderson, Chris Solomon and Dumesny.
A lap down was Terry Rankin, Steven Loader, Doukas, Daly, Parker Scott, Buckingham and Jones. Andrew Hughes, Dane Court, Milburn and Goodyer failed to finish.
Next week, November 2nd , sees the Distinct ICT Sprintcar Series (formerly the Eureka Series) get underway with round 1 at Premier Speedway, Warrnambool along with an open field of Wingless Sprints also.
