This weekend we had some family business to attend to in Binghamton. So we took the opportunity to go to Shangri-La II. What an awesome venue. The track looks like a blast to drive on, the food was good, it was BYOB, and the ticket price was reasonable. And if you show up early enough, you can watch the drags at Skyview on the same ticket. I’ll be going back and bringing the boy.

The racing was…decent… The car counts weren’t great. 13 Mods, 7 Late Models, and 5 Ministocks. And 17 Street Stocks(I’ll get back to them). My son would have loved the show. I was amazed at how many wrecks you could have with so few cars. On the plus side, I got to see an upset in almost every class.

I keep hearing about how great the Street Stock car count at SL2 is compared to the other local asphalt tracks. And with 17 cars the count certainly isn’t bad. I hear a lot of theories as to why the count is so good. The most popular one is the high purse. However, I think I can sum it up in three words: Sharpsteen, Snell, and Zacharias. These three families accounted for half of the field. I give them kudos for supporting the class and SL2 is lucky to have them but their presence is artificially pads the relative counts. Many of the other tracks in the area have had this kind of thing happen over the years and it happens in other classes all the time. Heck, the Miller boys had something like 6 cars between them at Oswego at one time. So at the moment, SL2 has three dedicated families putting everything they have into their favorite class/track. Kudos to them.

So anyway, despite the draw of running on what looks like an awesome track, I don’t think I’ll be hauling down there. There’s just too much about my car I doubt they’ll let fly. I wandered through the pit after the show and looked at all the (wrecked) cars. They look like glorified pure stocks. From conversations with some of the drivers at RoC I’m sure they’re not but mine doesn’t even pretend to be one. Maybe the Fall Brawl will have looser rules or at least looser tech.

This will be a busy week. I got gears for Evans Mills so I’m going to take it up to practice on Wednesday. If everything goes well, I’ll swap the gears back and go to Spencer on Friday. If that goes well, I’ll swap them again and go to the Mills Saturday. Then I’ll take a nap and decide where I want to go next week.