What a difference a week makes, as Larry Spencer III found out. The week before he saw his car head into the fence. Last Sunday, Spencer drove it into victory lane.
The crash occurred on June 9 at Evergreen Raceway in Drums, Pennsylvania. Johnny Bennett, of Lehighton, Pennsylvania, drove the Saturn SC2. Bennett drives the car in four-cylinder points events.
“He hit the tire barrier and it acted like a ramp,” Spencer, of Berwick, Pennsylvania, said. “Luckily, the catchfence did its job. Five miles an hour faster and he would have gone through the fence.”
Bennett was not injured. He sat in a Kirkey seat paired with a Simpson five-point harness. Bennett wore a Simpson helmet with a HANS device. The car’s roll cage held up without issue, but the Saturn did not emerge from the wreck unscathed.
“My car had everything on the left rear damaged,” said Spencer. “The wheel, the hub center, and the strut.”
Fortunately, Spencer found all the parts he needed at the family junkyard and prepared the car for a non-points four-cylinder race at Evergreen Raceway on Sunday. This time Spencer was behind the wheel.
“Since it was not a points race, only three four-cylinder cars showed up,” Spencer said. “So, I asked the promoter if we could race in the 100-lap enduro with four-cylinder cars on Hoosier tires. He said we can have an overall winner and the first enduro car across the line would be the enduro winner.”
Spencer became the overall winner.
“The longest four-cylinder race at Evergreen Raceway is 40 laps,” said Spencer. “I had no idea that you could get 100 laps on our Hoosiers. That’s more than double an extra-distance race for us. I thought we would fall off when the sticky compound began to melt.”
The victory was Spencer’s first in 10 years. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Larry Spencer III.
“The best thing was that it was Father’s Day,” Spencer said. “I had all three of my kids in victory lane. My son Lucas, 5, won the juice box feature and two hours later I won my first race in 10 years!”
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.
