HERMON – Matt Gillie went to Speedway 95 for Sunday’s opening day of racing with a car he thought was fast enough to win, and snazzy enough that a panel of judges deemed it the winner of his division’s “pretty car” competition.

He left after racing less than a quarter of a lap in the qualifying heat.

And the pretty car? Not pretty.

“I don’t know whether to scream or cry or what,” said Holden’s Gillie after he took a jolt from driver Rob Brideau entering turn one, spun around, and withstood at least two more whacks from other drivers before skidding to a halt.

“She’s tore up,” said Gillie, who crashed during qualifying for the Coca-Cola 50-lap feature in the Limited division.

“It’s pretty much junk. I’ve got probably $2,000 or $3,000 damage. It’ll be a few months before I can get back [racing] now. I’ve been all winter saving my money to do this,” Gillie said, waving a hand at his wrecked car. “And here it is.”

Gillie’s lament was one repeated around the track all afternoon on Sunday, as drivers worked out a winter’s worth of frustration – and rust – in a series of crash-filled races.

“It’s racing fever, I guess,” Justin Pickard of Ellsworth said after working his way up through the 18-car starting field to place second in the day’s Limited feature. “It was crazy out there.

Race winner Dana Wilbur of Prospect concurred.

“Everybody’s antsy,” Wilbur said.

Twenty drivers showed up with plans of racing for the $440 first-prize check in the Limited division’s first Coca-Cola 50-lapper. By the time qualifying finished, 18 were left.

And by the finish, only nine were still running. Jake O’Brien of Jackson finished third.

Another pre-race casualty: Bobby O’Brien of Calais, who won the first heat race, but didn’t even get to start the feature. O’Brien stopped to have his picture taken after winning his heat, and when he tried to drive back to the pits, his car didn’t cooperate.

“I put it into gear and let the clutch out and she broke right there,” Bobby O’Brien said.

Drivers raced (as well as careened and spun) through seven yellow flags and one red before Wilbur emerged with his first Limited win in the first race of his third season in the division.

Wilbur passed Lloyd Nickerson of Corinth on lap 31, then staged a thrilling side-by-side duel with Nickerson over the next 15 laps.

Wilbur ran high, Nickerson tried to sneak by on the low side, and neither car gained much of an advantage until Nickerson spun coming out of turn four on lap 46.

That made the subsequent restart crucial, as Wilbur lined up beside Pickard for a four-lap dash to the checkers. Pickard, though, knew he was in trouble.

“I lost my clutch [during the last caution].” Pickard said. “I couldn’t shift into third, so I had to start it in fourth and I couldn’t quite get the jump I needed.”

In fact, Wilbur was the only driver among the top three who avoided equipment trouble.

Third-place finisher Jake O’Brien, a Unity Raceway regular who made his Speedway 95 debut on Sunday, had problems so severe that he had to shut his car down in order to shift it into first gear during the red-flag stoppage.

“We were in the pits pretty much the whole day,” he said. “We missed our heat race because we had clutch problems. We’ve had the transmission out of the car four times today.”