1. Agreed that the first race was caution filled and having 8 finishers in a 17 car field is not the way to win over the fans. There was some good racing at the front and an interesting battle with Steve Roblee and Mike Alguire on the side-by-side restarts. On the backstretch on both of the final starts there was lots of banging going on between the drivers. The last time it appeared that Steve initiated the contact with a right turn into the 32 about half way down the straight. It seemed to me like he was trying to upset the  other car going into the turn for the restart.

Roblee spoke about needing to take care of your car in order to win at Barrie. As can be seen in the pic below he has some experience with this at Barrie 🙂 ... this is from a 1993 CASCAR win.

2. The second race went 50 laps non-stop and 17 year-old rookie Steve Matthews checked out on the field. Not too many features at Barrie run caution free. The race might have been better had Steve Roblee not taken so long in traffic but kudos to Matthews who threatened at times in the 1st feature as well. A sterling run on his first trip to Barrie (that I am aware of) and he was impressive all night in the McColl car.

Here's Matthews leading Merrifield in the first 50.

3. The third 50 had a nailbiter most of the distance with fast qualifier Shawn McGlynn biting at the heels of the ageless Bob Merrifield. Merrifield had earlier been outgunned on a restart into turn 1 by Alguire but nudged his way back into the lead and hung on ahead of a pesky and fast McGlynn to take the win. He told me after that he was having to work the throttle because it would start to miss when it was wide-open.

Bob has been around forever and first raced at Barrie in the 1st year of CASCAR in 1981. The picture below is of his shiny new Chrysler Kit Car that he ran at Windsor in the early 1970s.

4. Here's my thought for next time out. The OSS cars were turning lap times very similar to the Barrie Late Models. Here are the top 5 qualifiers' times and these are very comparable to the time trials from earlier this season (and off the track LM record pace of 14.299 that no one has approached this year in LM):
   
  1 81 14.52     
  2 88 14.68     
  3 82 14.69     
  4 28 14.71     
  5 43 14.78

So how about a match race to be run after all the features? Take the top point guy, the feature winner, a crowd selection from each division and let them at it for a winner take all purse.

It would be a unique fan friendly event. I don't know what the drivers would think of it but it seems to me that promoters need to start doing some different things to keep things interesting.

I recall a match race at Westgate in 1974 between the leading hobby car (Nesbitt?) and the leading Diamond car, Stu Hunter. That one ended in a major wreck against the wall but the fans loved it. Many recall fondly the Delaware match race in the late 70s with Hanley smoking Biederman. From the people that remember being at that one it seems there was a crowd of 30-40 thousand 🙂 I was there that night and the stands were certainly full even though the race itself was a bit of a dud.

Here's a link to more pics from the event at Barrie:
http://public.fotki.com/RodM/canadian_short_trac/2008-ontario-sports/