After a brief shower and under threatening skies, Oakshade Raceway was able to get through its entire racing program on what turned out to be a fairly decent evening on Saturday night.
The start of the heat races was delayed by just 20 minutes due to the early rain shower, and once racing began, the track was extremely fast and in great racing condition all night long.
In the final night of competition before the Season Championship night on August 23 for the late models, the feature ran with only once caution. That caution came out just after the first lap with Mike Marteney, Kris Patterson and Dean Anderson suffering the worst of it.
It was the second week in a row of bad luck for Patterson who is competing for the points championship with his night ending very early in the race.
Bruce Stuart led that first lap, but Hillard Miller dove down low to steal away the lead on the restart.
Justin Paxton drove like he was shot out of a cannon after starting seventh and caught Miller by lap nine. The next lap, Paxton shot to the inside of miller and assumed the lead.
Paxton continued his charge pulling away from Miller and the rest of the field.
With no more cautions to tighten up the field, Paxton put at least half the field a lap down and went on to the easy win over Hillard Miller, Bruce Stuart and Todd Schroyer.
Next to take center stage was the sportsman feature and Tim Fisher took advantage of starting on the pole to pull out to a big lead over Rob Liaeff and Devin Shiels.
Fisher worked well through lapped traffic in what turned out to be a very quick race. Liaeff and Shiels could not reel in the leader and Fisher won his first sportsman feature of the year. Liaeff and Shiels finished second and third respectively followed by Joe Derbeck and Ray Klaywitter.
Brice Luttrell moved nicely up through the field in the bomber A Main in the first two laps getting up to fifth after starting 11th, but Luttrell lost a tire as he came off turn two to bring out the only yellow flag of the event and it was the end of his night.
Jacob Rendel led a freight train of cars running nose to tail for much of the rest of the race with Brad Miller, Jim Scout and Robert Gregory running in his tire tracks. They stayed in that order for the finish of the bomber A Main giving Rendel his first A Main win of the year.
Josh Steinacker led early in the bomber B Main with Todd Silvey running second and Randy Miller and Chuck Leininger battling hard for third.
After a couple cautions, Steinacker was able to pull away from the rest of the field.
Randy Miller spun with just two laps to go while running third taking himself out of the top five.
Steinacker went on to pick up the victory. Todd Silvey finished second ahead of Leininger and Ted Goetz Jr.
The lead turned out to be a bad place in the bomber C Main. Tommy Huff took the lead on lap four from Dan Shaffer and then fell off the pace three laps later and went to the pits.
Shaffer then reassumed the lead, but then appeared to have an engine let go and almost caused an accident as the rest of the leaders scrambled to get around Shaffer’s ailing car.
In the end, it was the 68 of Rich Risner who passed Brad Blonde to take the checkered flag followed closely by Blonde and Jody Burton.
It took four attempts to get the bomber D Main started after a slew of first lap incidents. Once things finally got going, Danny Hogrefe gained a lot of positions up to second behind Gene Zollner, but retired to the pits on lap two.
Zollner who was pursued by Chris Dotson in the later stages of the race seemed to be on his way to the win, but contact with the lapped car of Brian Manley resulted in Zollner spinning down the back stretch and handing over the easy victory to Chis Dotson. Jeff Krotzer finished second followed by Jeff Proffet in third.
This coming Saturday is Season Championship night at Oakshade Raceway for the late model division. The sportsman and bomber cars will also be in action.
