Dave Porter wins his 3rd in a row at the Nashville Speedway

Friday, February 19th   New drivers Bob Moore and Jimmy Fox arrived along with the regular favorites of the N4Nites Racing league.

After what seemed to be a quick practice session with Mike Redd turning some very quick times, the pole position would go to Jeff Prutzman whose team has recently been doing quite well in their qualifying program.  Mike Redd did place second and was followed closely by Ben Simmons who rounded off the top 3 qualifying spots.

Our race beings with Jeff leading the field down to the green flag waving.  Going into turn 1, Jeff enters late and runs up the track.  Causing him to get into some dirt, scraping the wall, and watching the field pass him low.  A bad start for the #52 team.

Jeff recovers but by lap 3 (when cars were at peak speeds) Ben clips the apron line and spins while running in 2nd place.  This causes a chain of events as the #8 (Jimmy Fox) runs up the track to avoid Ben.  Jimmy innocently pushes Bobby Rafuse up the track who was running near his door at the time.  Bobby taps the wall, which ricochets him back to the near running #8 and taps the tail end of his truck.   Jimmy spins without incident but the yellow flag does come out to control the field.

On the restart - Lap 6, it was a turkey run into turn 1 as cars showed no mercy going three wide.

After a round of pit stops, Jeff Prutzman finds his car damage is more than it can take.   From the earlier incident and a secondary incident involving the #24 of Dave Porter.  Dave ran up on Jeff's bumper during the 1st caution and pushed him off the track.  Jeff stopped by means of the pit road entrance barrier, causing front end body damage and engine damage.

Bob Moore (returning in the #60) faired well for most of the race.  A few bumps and minor scratches didn't prevent him from loosing the lead lap.  That is until right around lap 70 when his wheel fell off.  The damage was too great to fix before the end of the race.

An extraordinary occurrence, never seen before in the history of N4Nites racing (or at least to this extreme), Ben Simmons in the #94 Kellogs car runs out of fuel while following Porter (#24) to the pits on lap 108.  The only difference, Simmons runs out of fuel while entering pit road and is forced to coast down pit road.  A difficult task in itself to roll without power and compile that with no tachometer to judge his speed, Ben was faced with his experience, training, and practice to estimate his speed and make an effective stop.  Coasting down pit road, Ben managed to keep his speeds under the limit.  With Porter directly behind Ben's stall, Ben had one shot at making his stop in front of Porter.

Pulling in, Ben stops short by just a FEW FEET!..  His pit crew … ???  Must not have known Ben was pitting and reports that followed found they were all at the hot dog stand.  Ben tried to get out of his car and push it to the limit line but instead exited out of frustration as he watched the lead, and a potential win, once again escape him on the track.

From this point on, the only condender appeared to be Bobby Rafuse who was slowly pulling away on his 3 second lead over Dave Porter.

As luck would have it "the Houdini" (Porter) did it again, stretching his fuel, sputtering across the finish line after gaining the lead from Rafuse who was forced to pit for fuel.