After Mike Mahaney won the Bruce Rogers Memorial Money Maker, he had to share the news with his car owner, George Huttig. He did so via FaceTime, with Mahaney’s wife, Mandee, holding the phone, from victory lane of Grandview Speedway.
Huttig and family couldn’t make the trip to Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania, from Elizabethtown, New York. Huttig’s wife, Julie, was having surgery.
“It is very emotional to connect in that moment like we did from victory lane,” Mahaney, of Elizabethtown, New York, said. “It was great to see them and for them to see that we won, in real time. It brought joy to them when they were going through a hard time.”
The $7,500 check from Grandview Speedway was one of several big checks Mahaney has brought back to Huttig. He earned $15,000 for a third during last year’s Super DIRT Week feature at Oswego Speedway in New York. There’s also a $10,000 payday from Autodrome Drummond in Quebec. However, it wasn’t necessarily the money that made the win at Grandview Speedway particularly notable.
“There is something special about racing at Grandview Speedway — it is really challenging to show up there and race,” said Mahaney. “There are great competitors who race there all the time — they are very hard to beat. I wasn’t the only invader — there was a tremendous amount of talent there.”
Mike Mahaney started the feature in fifth and Stewart Friesen challenged him along the way.
“Standing on the podium, I was flanked by [third-place finisher] Jeff Strunk, whom I consider to be one of the greatest of all time at Grandview, and [second-place] Stewart Friesen, whose incredible career went to NASCAR from dirt,” Mahaney said. “That podium says a lot about the competition at Grandview Speedway.”
Huttig and family couldn’t watch the action live, though, like at so many tracks. The only live experience that had was from Mahaney’s FaceTime session in victory lane.
“Grandview Speedway doesn’t do streaming of their events,” said Mahaney. “It brings a different feel to their racetrack. They pack the place because you have to be there to see it. It’s an experience like no other racetrack has. It’s super special for me, as a driver, to be part of 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.
