Things started off well for Coleby Frye on Sunday. In the first appearance of the super late models on the 3/8-mile at Bridgeport Motorsports Park in New Jersey, he set fast time. However, when the feature rolled, things took a turn for the worse.
Frye took the first spot on the third lap of the 40-lap feature. He widened his lead until a caution on lap 27. On the restart, Frye took the outside and National Dirt Late Model Hall of Famer Rick Eckert rode on the inside.
“We rubbed a bit, and then our noses locked together,” Frye said of the contact between his car and Eckert’s. “His right front was on top of my left front, and it pinned my wheel and spun me around.”
The action didn’t stop there. Andy Haus, with nowhere to go, hit Frye’s car, flipping Frye’s ride over.
“The crash tore up the body a bit, but there wasn’t any frame damage,” Frye, 37, of Dover, Pennsylvania, said. “A carburetor stud got broken, so we could not continue in the race.”
Eckert won. Haus finished third. Frye took home a seventh.
Away from the track, Frye has a full plate, to say the least. At his business Fryeco Fabrication, Frye builds and repairs race cars, supplies body panels, and owns Superfly Performance Shocks.
“Things are going great at Fryeco,” said Frye. “We are busy as heck. We are doing a lot of updating of chassis, keeping cars relevant with all the changes and saving drivers money.”
Coleby Frye flipped in one of hise cars. He sat in a The Joie of Seating full-containment seat, with a Crow Safety Gear five-point harness. Frye wore a HANS device paired with a Simpson helmet.
“The safety equipment worked well,” Frye said. “The car wasn’t that bad off. Things could have been a lot worse.”
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.
