Bronco busting would probably be as easy as eating a piece of Texas sheet cake for Koby Adams. Adams held onto his steed after it kicked up as the result of contact with an infield tire. The incident occurred during his heat race at Monarch Motor Speedway in Wichita Falls, Texas. Adams then saddled back up to finish sixth in the USRA limited modified feature.
“[My car] got a little loose coming out of turn four, and the car behind me ran into us,” said Adams, 30, of Randlett, Oklahoma. “I hit that tire and went for a hell of a ride, bouncing all over the place.”
Surprisingly, Adams only had minimal damage, despite his car catching air on all four corners. Adams replaced an upper ball joint and a bent rim and then returned to competition on the ¼-mile bullring of an oval.
“Monarch Motor Speedway gives us a good, smooth surface every week,” Adams said. “It is the dry, slick track from hell, but, with a good setup and some experience, you can master it.”
Most of the cars at Monarch Motor Speedway run with built engines instead of crate ones. Koby Adams said the built engines perform best on small tracks.
“The challenge is not to ‘loose it’ on that slick track,” Adams said. “Once you start to spin, you give the race up, especially in the feature.”
Adams’s son, Keyton, 11, races at Monarch Motor Speedway in the USRA Tuner class, which features four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive cars. Keyton, like his father, had an incident in his heat race. Keyton broke a right-rear hub assembly and came back, like his father, to do well in the feature event, where he finished fifth.
“Heat races can sometimes be difficult,” Adams said. “We both definitely had tough heat races, but that didn’t slow us down.”
The Outside Groove Director of Photography 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.
