Gary Bellefleur has the itch.

It’s the itch to hop into his car, take the green flag, and rub fenders with a couple dozen other drivers for 35 or so laps.

The 1993 stock car racing season is so close to beginning you can almost smell the fumes. As a matter of fact, most of the drivers around the state probably smell like they use a cologne called DW-30 after spending the winter months cooped up in a garage trying to get every mile per hour out of their engines.

With this early season anticipation comes rain. Lots of it.

Bellefleur, a late model sportsman driver from Stetson, should have raced twice by now – once at Thompson (Conn.) International Speedway and once at Lee/USA in Lee, N.H. Thompson was snowed out and Lee, the season-opener for the GM Good-wrench Tour (formerly American Canadian Tour), was rained out.

“I think anticipation is the word,” Bellefleur said. “I’ve been anxious because we were scheduled to start racing on April 1 at Thompson. We were ready for that, but we got snowed out. It’s been anticipation every weekend.”

Many other drivers know the feeling. After months of getting their cars in tune, they want to hit the tracks.

“It reminds me of when I was a kid and I’d be waiting to get out of school for the summer,” said Gary Smith of Bangor, a late model driver. “Day after day after day…. you’re looking forward to it so much that it never seems to get there.”

While the drivers wait, they often turn to each other, checking in on old friends and rehashing races past.

“If you can’t get out there, talk about it or watch old videos,” said Smith with a laugh. “We’ve done a lot of that.”

Plus, the days leading up to that first event are spent making sure each and every nut and screw on the car is perfect.

“There’s always things to do,” said Bellefleur. “We’ve been going right steady. We’ve got plenty of things to do. You can never be too prepared.”

In these next few weeks, a lot of hustling and bustling by drivers and crews will take place as teams make sure things are ready by their respective season-opening race.

Until then, the cars will sit quietly and the weather will turn warmer. Someday soon that green flag will drop and the 1993 racing season will be under way.

Needless to say, Newburgh native Ricky Craven is pleased following his second-place finish last weekend at Hickory, N.C. It was his best finish since heading south to join the highly competitive NASCAR Grand National tour.

Craven, the former track champion at Unity Raceway, came within half a car length of beating Steve Grissom to the checkered flag in the Mountain Dew 300.

“After I caught him, he never slipped from his line on the track. I just couldn’t find a spot to get around him,” Craven said.

Craven, the Grand National Rookie of the Year last season, is quite pleased with his showings of late and says better things are still to come.

“Our team has shown steady improvement since the last couple of races of 1992,” Craven said. “We had been in position to win four of the five races before Hickory, but something always happened. But believe me when I say we’re going to be contenders in every race from now until the season ends.”

Craven and the rest of the Grand National drivers are off until May 1 when they’ll be in action at the Orange County Speedway in Rougemont, N.C.

One of the biggest coups in Maine auto racing happened last fall when Tom Curley, the brainchild behind the highly successful GM Goodwrench Tour, and Michael Liberty, the boss man at Oxford Plains Speedway, announced that NASCAR was out and ACT was in for the 1993 season.

Coupled with that announcement was the notice of a series of 10 stock car racing events which would comprise the 1993 Maine Late Model State Championship.

A $30,000 point fund – with $5,000 going to the winner – has been established for the series, which will consist of five races at Oxford and five races at Beech Ridge Motor Speedway in Scarborough. Six of those races (three at each track) will be Goodwrench Tour races.

The first event in the series, a 150-lap show, is slated to begin this weekend at OPS’s one-third-mile oval. Post time Sunday is 1 p.m.