Jimmy Davy propelled to new heights after winning his first IMCA sport mod feature. The feat occurred last Saturday night at Cocopah Speedway in Somerton, Arizona.
“I was so excited that I jumped as high as I could,” Davy, of Yuma, Arizona, said. “When I won a stock car feature, I once tried a Carl Edwards-style backflip and made a real bad landing. I didn’t want that to happen again. I’m 40 years old now, so I played it safe and jumped straight up.”
The 2012 IMCA hobby stock track champion moved into stock cars in 2013. H switched to the sport mods in 2018 after a bad experience in the stock cars.
“I rolled my stock car six times in 2018, on the first night, in the first heat race of the Arizona IMCA tour,” said Davy. “The car was destroyed. I decided to move to the sport mod division right then and there. There was no better time to switch.”
Davy struggled in the sport mods.
“Everything I thought I knew in stock cars and hobby stocks did not transfer over to sport mods,” Davy said.
With just a handful of top-fives in sport mods, things took a turn for the worse at the beginning of 2021.
“In this year’s IMCA.TV Winter Nationals, another driver, who had nowhere to go during a crash, center-punched the passenger side of my frame,” said Davy. “I had to buy a new car.”
Davy replaced his Jet Racing chassis with an Impala front end with a brand-new Jet Racing car with a Chevelle front end. On the second night out, the radiator cap came loose and he overheated the engine.
Then, Davy’s lucky break came. Fellow Jet Racing driver Shane Paris, of Muscatine, Iowa, rolled into town and offered Davy advice.
“I found out how he set up his car and I got mine in the ballpark,” Davy said. “Shane gave me confidence. He convinced me I could win — that made a world of difference.”
On the fourth night out with his new car, Jimmy Davy won.
“The long road to my first win — all the things that went wrong along the way, and all the hard work that went into driving a sport mod — made that win so much sweeter,” said Davy.
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.
