When Donnie Wamsley lost his left-rear wheel, he didn’t flinch. Instead, he focused on finding the front of the pack. That resulted in the Joe Dirt 100 enduro win at Tyler County Speedway last Saturday.
“I just kept the hammer down,” Wamsley, of Clarksburg, West Virginia, said. “If I let off the gas, my car would become like a skier on one ski. I had to make the rear end keep chasing the front end.”
The wheel fell off around halfway, just when Wamsley was a lap down.
“The trick is not getting your car too hot running flat out early in the race,” said Wamsley. “When a caution came out with 15 laps to go, I was right behind the leaders and passed them to win.”
Wamsley didn’t always drive like that.
“I used to run wide open the whole race,” Wamsley said. “I’ve been racing since I was 14, and I’m 41 now. When I started racing in front-wheel-drive cars, my daddy said, ‘Get to the front as fast as you can.’ I always raced that way, but since getting into enduros and learning technique over the past few years, I changed my driving style — I start putting down fast laps halfway through the race.”
Of course, Wamsley didn’t expect to lose a wheel halfway, but he kept to his plan.
“The key is to keep the car straight while not letting off the throttle,” said Wamsley. “In front-wheel-drive racing the left rear lifts off the ground normally, if you are going fast enough.”
Apparently, Donnie Wamsley was fast enough as he won the Joe Dirt 100, with his three sons watching their father put on a show.
“[My sons] told me the track announcer was having fun with me racing on three wheels,” Wamsley said. “The crowd was pumped and I guess it was exciting on both sides of the fence.”
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.
