Mayberry doesn’t take pass on busy summer schedule

loading...

He may be the busiest man in Maine auto racing.

Tom Mayberry is in the first year of a three-year contract to lease Wiscasset Raceway, he is president of the Pro All-Stars Series tour, and he has put together the 400-lap Big Dawg Challenge at Wiscasset, which features a purse in excess of $202,000 and could pay the winner up to $100,000.

The Big Dawg Challenge will be held Oct. 11-12.

He has endured the ups and downs of the business and will have plenty of decisions to make during the off-season.

One of those decisions will involve Friday night racing at Wiscasset. Mayberry switched the track’s weekly series from Saturday nights to Friday nights this season, and he intends to re-evaluate his decision.

“We’re leaning toward Friday nights again next year but we’ll make that decision in a month and a half,” said Mayberry. “The weather hasn’t been good. It has been pretty tough. We moved the starting time back from 7 to 7:30 to give people more time to get here from work. Things have picked up a little bit.”

He said the car counts and attendance at the races have been “growing a little bit” in recent weeks.”

The street stock and mini-stock classes have had consistently respectable car counts, ranging from 12 to 22 each week, but the lack of cars in the pro stock class prompted Mayberry to stop running them every week.

“We were getting only six or eight a week so we decided to have just special shows [beginning July 4],” said Mayberry.

He has substituted late models, which use an eight-inch tire and two-barrel engines, rather than the 10-inch tire and four-barrel engines on the pro stock class.

“I’m not real sure what we’re going to do about it [in the future],” said Mayberry.

He also brought back the modified cars and said, “We’ve had 13 different cars so we’re happy with that for the first year.”

He said his Sunday night entry-level race card has “grown every week,” with the highlight of the evening being the flagpole race in which cars have to circle a huge tire in the middle of the track on every lap except the first.

“That’s the best thing I ever did. The crowd loves it,” said Mayberry.

As for the PASS tour, Mayberry said, “We’ve been real happy with it. We’ve got more talent this year. Ben [points leader and defending points champion Ben Rowe] has been dominating a little bit. We’re already working on the schedule for next year. We’re going to go down south a little more. And we’re going to make a few changes in the way we do things.”

One of those changes probably will be the elimination of the time trials.

“We’ll probably go back to drawing numbers out of a hat for the starting positions in the heat races,” said Mayberry.

This could help create more parity as the fastest cars wouldn’t be guaranteed to start in the top 10.

“We already know of 45 drivers who are coming for sure,” said Mayberry.

The Big Dawg Challenge should attract 90 to 100 cars, Mayberry said.

The race will highlight a full card of racing over three days, beginning Friday, Oct. 10.

The Big Dawg portion will begin Saturday, Oct. 11, with four 50-lap heat races.

There also will be consolation races, and the race itself will feature a 39- or 40-car field.

PASS race features altered format

The E.J. Prescott 150 PASS race on Sunday afternoon at Wiscasset Raceway will have a different format.

There will be three 50-lap races and the cars on the lead lap of the first race will be inverted for the start of the second race. The same inversion will take place before the third race.

The winner of a race will get one point, the second-place driver will get two points and so on. The driver who accumulates the fewest points will be crowned the winner.

“Why not try something different?,” said South Paris driver Sam Sessions. “The fans will love it.”

“I think it will be exciting,” said Rowe.

“They used to do it in NEPSA. It’s pretty fun,” said Wiscasset’s Scott Chubbuck.

“It should be interesting. We’ll get to see Benny [Rowe] in the back for a little while,” joked Farmington’s Cassius Clark.

Time trials begin at 1.