PASS Tour expands Speedway 95 opens Sunday

The Pro All Stars Series is growing.

The pro stock series, which will begin its sixth season as the PASS North tour April 29 at Oxford Plains Speedway, held its first race in the first-year PASS South tour last weekend with Turner’s Mike Rowe taking the checkered flag ahead of Louisville’s Chuck Barnes and Clay Rogers of Concord, N.C., in the 28-car field.

The PASS South tour isn’t the only new division.

The PASS Outlaw late model division will make its debut with racing in two regions: North and Central. There will be eight 100-lap races in each region, including combination races at Scarborough’s Beech Ridge Motor Speedway on Sept. 23 and at Unity Raceway on Oct. 28.

The first North region race will be at Unity Raceway on April 30 with the first Central region feature being held at Canaan Fair Speedway (N.H.) on May 21.

The PASS Modifieds return for their third season with a 14-race schedule that begins at Hermon’s Speedway 95 on May 7.

PASS founder and president Tom Mayberry is pleased with the expansion.

“We thought about going down [south],” said Mayberry. “They had a Big 10 series at Concord (N.C.) but the car counts got low and they were struggling real bad. They had no place to race.”

Mayberry said he was able to put the tour together “overnight.

“I made a few calls and got together with a few people,” explained Mayberry. “We thought we’d start out with four races. Then everybody wanted six. A week ago, we were shooting for eight and on our final schedule, we ended up with 11.”

He said a couple of marketing firms, Speed 51 and DSG, helped with the marketing and promotion of the tour as did motorsports broadcaster Bob Dillner, president of 51 Sports.

Mayberry said being able to race the regular PASS tour for the first time at Beech Ridge last season and returning to Oxford Plains Speedway was a real plus for the tour, and both tracks are again on the schedule along with Speedway 95, which “is one of the first places we got a race” six years ago. Those are the three Maine tracks among the nine that will host races.

There will be two races at Scotia Speedworld in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Mayberry said race teams willing to make that journey will receive money to help cover their travel expenses.

“Teams that went up there last year will receive $750 and the new guys who didn’t go up last year will receive $600,” said Mayberry.

Mayberry said PASS North drivers can run South races and vice versa and there will be two races that have provisional spots for drivers from the other series: the second annual PASS 400 weekend at Beech Ridge on Sept. 22-24 and the PASS South race in South Boston, Va. on Nov. 17-18.

“We’d like to add a third region before we’re done. That’s in the works,” said Mayberry. “And we’d like to have a three-race series with one race in each region.”

The new Outlaw class will act as a proving ground for the PASS tour.

“The idea is to get some drivers to go to different tracks, get used to different facilities and get their teams together in the hope they can move up next year,” explained Mayberry. “It’s so hard for a young team to step right in and run the PASS tour. This way, the young guys can get their feet wet.”

Mayberry said the Outlaw cars will have to run wet sump motors that are at least $5,000 cheaper than the dry sump motors used by most of the PASS regulars.

Speedway 95 starts Sunday

Del Merritt, co-owner of Hermon’s Speedway 95, is optimistic about the season, which gets under way at his track on Sunday at 2 p.m. A pretty car contest will kick it off at 1:30.

“I think the car counts are going to be healthy in all of our classes,” said Merritt. “A lot of drivers are moving up in class. We should have some real exciting racing this year.”

He has dropped one division on his Saturday night race card, the four-cylinder trucks, but those trucks will be allowed to compete in the sport-four division. There will be five divisions: pro stocks, limiteds, super streets, strictly streets and sport-fours.

“We had only five or six trucks last year and that’s not very entertaining,” said Merritt, who will have two PASS tour races and two of PASS’ new Outlaw class races.

Wacky Wednesday racing for entry-level drivers will start June 7.