Taylor Cook (21) doesn’t shy away from going three-wide, as seen here, with Clayton Miller (15) and Jamie Mosley (89) at Seymour, Tennessee’s 411 Motor Speedway. Nor does a four-hour commute to the races deter him. The long hours and hard work paid off for Cook, as he won at 411 last weekend.
“We go wherever there are UMP dirt modified races — and there are none in the Charlotte area,” said Cook, 26, of Denver, North Carolina. “You could say that’s half dedication and half the box we painted ourselves into. We couldn’t afford pavement racing, so we invested in dirt racing.”
Cook grew up on pavement racing in Ohio, before he moved to North Carolina, where he works for Joe Gibbs Racing as an electrician on their NASCAR Cup cars. In the Tarheel State Cook discovered dirt modified racing, although to race in that class requires three to four hours on the road to the nearest track. Regardless of the distance, Taylor won more than 50 features in his eight years of racing modifieds.
“It’s cost effective for us — we can recoup a lot of our investment,” Cook said. “Pavement racing is expensive, and when you wreck a pavement car, you wreck it hard.”
Cook loves smooth racetracks, and 411 Motor Speedway delivered that kind of surface last weekend.
“The track definitely suited my style — racing on slick surfaces, requiring a fair amount of finesse,” said Cook. “I don’t like getting headaches from driving on rough tracks, let alone the car damage. I like to practice throttle control and race as smoothly as possible.”
Each year Cook takes his dirt modified back to his home state of Ohio for the last race of the DIRTcar Summit Racing Equipment Modified Nationals held at Oakshade Raceway in Wauseon.
“Traveling is a bear — towing on windy roads for hours,” Cook said. “If we could run four nights a week two hours away, we would certainly do that.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
