On Memorial Day weekend Sunny South Raceway hosted its 6th annual Race to Glory and Legends Regional Qualifier. The Friday the 27th was the standard format ie. heat then feature program for all classes. On Saturday night the 28 we had timed qualifying for all classes with 20 lap features for the Bandoleros, Stingers and Pro-Challenge with a 40 lap feature for the Legends. There was a good field of really fast cars on hand to challenge SSR's 1/4 mile banked oval. There were 21 Legend cars available. For Friday's program they ran the Semi-Pro and Young Lyons separately as a class (13 YL/SP) and (8 Pro/ Masters). There were cars from Charlotte, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada and I believe one from Texas. Additionaly we had our friends The Massaro family fron Gadsden, AL; Tommy, Traci, the upcoming driver Ryan and his brother (whose name escapes me at this late hour) on hand.
These were to be Connelly's third and fourth legend race, and he had never qualified on time before. His qualifying time was OK a 13.74 which he was not pleased with, but all in all it was a fair lap and gave him the 17 th starting position out of 21 cars for the 40 lap race on Saturday.
On Friday he drew fourth starting position for the heat got to third, then got snookered on a restart and fell to fourth which is where he finished. He had a fairly good feature passed a few cars, then had them take the "choose" and go up to the front and he would have to pass them again. He wound up 9th in the feature out of 13 cars.
On Saturday, I told him to stay in touch with the pack for the first 20 laps than try to make some passes in the second half of the race. He did that and stayed out of trouble. At around the 3/4 point in the race our friend Ryan Massaro got together with the white #91 (Ryan's car is the black and white#91) with the white #91 going for a two flip ride, landing on its wheels against the back wall just about destroying the white #91, fortunately no one was injured. There were a couple of other incidents that required a red flag situation, but no injuries only burised pride.
Connelly wound up finishing 12th. He did get lapped but he managed to lap at least one car that was still running at the end. Man, they had some strong cars there. The winning car came out of Charlote with one of the Plot brothers winning and his brother second. Local driver Cody Logan was third. All in all it was a very good experience for Connelly and the #32 team. Liked to worked me to death. Had to break two sets of tires, we had the hood blow off in practice, I think Connelly forgot to put the front hood pin in, had to repair that. Also in practice had a weld break on the muffler it came off but we were able to retrieve it and Cliff Osmer found a 110 v mig welder and welded the tab back on with the help of Tommy Massaro. I used the old racing fix of two loops of bailing wire to insure that the muffler stayen in place, it worked and we came home with our muffler. As mentioned before Connelly got a lot of "seat time" and I got a lot of practice fixing stuff, and we brought the car home in one piece, all in all a good weekend.
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