Gage Neal left the Clash on the Coast last week with two feature wins. The miniseries held at two Florida tracks — Northwest Florida Speedway in Baker and Southern Raceway in Milton — drew 51 IMCA stock cars for the class’s debut in the Sunshine State.
“The amazing thing is that none of them were from Florida,” said Clash on the Coast promoter Peyton Taylor, of Batesville, Arkansas. “They traveled 10 to 18 hours one way to get here. That speaks volumes of the popularity of the division.”
One of those drivers who trekked from hours away was Neal. His haul to the Emerald Coast took 15-plus hours and 1,000-plus miles.
“I’d never been outside of the Midwest to race,” Neal, of Springville, Iowa, said. “We went down there on a wild hair, just to give it a shot.”
When he arrived at Northwest Florida Speedway, he encountered a track unlike anything he has raced on back home in Iowa.
“Both tracks [Northwest Florida Speedway and Southern Raceway] were sandy and hard to read,” said Neal. “Being from Iowa, we weren’t used to that type of surface. So, we threw the kitchen sink at it.”
The kitchen sink seemed to work. He won the first two features at Northwest Florida Speedway. Neal finished sixth and eighth the following two nights at Southern Raceway. He finished second to Dallon Murty in points.
“We would like to get five or six wins this year — we’re off to a good start,” Neal said.
As Gage Neal prepares to start the season at his home track of Maquoketa Speedway, Taylor is already preparing for next year.
“The series was absolutely phenomenal,” said Taylor. “We had 149 cars — and it’s just the second year of the series. We worked around the weather and everyone had plenty of time for some fun away from the racetrack.”
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.
