A recent rule change at Grandview Speedway divided Brian Hirthler and his family. His brother, Kevin, and nephew, Jesse, elected to race elsewhere. Brian changed his car, a 2015 Bicknell, loaded it up on a rollback, and brought a crew of three to Grandview. It resulted in a win last Saturday and more than $8,000 in money earned.
“Grandview Speedway is a 20-minute haul for me,” Brian, of Green Lane, Pennsylvania, said. “Of course, I miss having [Kevin and Jesse] next to me. It was nice that all three of us parked together. We shared information about track conditions and hung out together.”
Grandview Speedway banned left-side Panhard bars. (For more on the rule change, read “Left-Side Panhard Bars Get Banned: In-Depth Analysis.”)
“For me, it was no big deal to switch back to the right Panhard bar — I was one of the last drivers to switch to the left in 2021,” said Brian. “I never took the right-side mounts off my chassis.”
For the redraw on Saturday, only two positions were left to be drawn. Hirthler grabbed both inside the bag and dropped one. The one he chose put him on the outside pole. While challenged by Tim Buckwalter and Mike Gular early in the race, he found the fast groove after a lap-37 restart.
Brian Hirthler said this race win is his biggest in his 13 years of racing. He earned it with a 10-year-old chassis and an engine he purchased for $12,000 as a rebuild in 2018. Brian said he refreshed it just once, with 935 laps on it since it last being done.
“At 1,000 laps, the engine should be refreshed — it could probably cost as much as $10,000, maybe a little less if I am lucky,” Brian said. “That’s $10 a lap. The $8,200 win will go a long way. I believe that in life, in general and in racing, there is always a silver lining.”
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.
