Our TBARA season opener will be at the grand opening of Full Throttle Speedway in Bradenton! This is the former De Soto Speedway that has recently been purchased by Kevin Williams, the most recent operator of Punta Gorda Speedway. His new track is under-going extensive renovations in preparation for their big grand-opening night, which will kick off a very successful future for FTS. This is good news for racing in Florida!
We are the featured attraction on their grand opening that will kick off on Saturday, May 4’th. This first night will be advertised and promoted extensively, so they expect a madhouse with over-flowing grandstands and a packed pit area. Our first priority has to be car count! Your friends and competitors in this organization need your participation in support of TBARA.
Full Throttle management has a favorable view of our organization, and they want to add additional races for us this year, however we must perform well on this first race.
As I work at selling TBARA races to track owners, I run into a persistent complaint regarding our past: “start and park” drivers. Despite the fact that we have cleaned up our act in the past year or two, the track owners remain focused on the large numbers of start and parkers who ran with us several years ago. I’d like to address this very clearly with you: we depend on having your cars in our field, but our future bargaining ability depends on everyone putting their foot in it and giving it their best effort. Yes, sometimes problems happen and knock us out of the race. Of course not everyone runs the same speed either, I am understand that. Even though we don’t have start and park problem anymore, we have to be sure that everyone unloads to race, and not to ride.
Next order of business, I’d like to welcome some new car and driver combinations to our series. Dude Teate is teaming with Darrell Connley to drive the #31 this year. They will be joined by another new car in our organization, the Tom Rice owned #84. Matt Alfonso, a long-time Jimmy Alvis crew member, has built a new car and will run for rookie of the year. I am not sure of everyone’s plans, but I certainly hope we are joined by Dave Slawiak and Sport Allen, who have been driving again recently.
The point money from the 2012 season has been paid out. It was divided among the 6 car owners who made at least 8 of the 9 events we ran last year. No other car owner ran 7, or even 6 of the events during the year. There were several who ran 5 nights, but we tried to split it up among the teams that supported the series most faithfully. Congratulations to our 2-time champion Johnny Gilbertson. I will award Johnny his championship trophy the next time we all get together at our first race.
I’ve never seen so many track management changes in such a short time! There are new owners, promoters or sanctions at 6 area tracks within the last year. We are in contact with some of them and are trying to fill up our schedule for 2013. Currently, there are two events at Citrus County, we are discussing four at Full Throttle. There is also exciting and promising news at another track, but I don’t have anything to announce on that yet.
Meanwhile, let’s get those cars ready to push off at Full Throttle Speedway on 5-4!
Buff Fritz
TBARA President