After a 10-year hiatus, Jon Kellner returned to the seat of a race car last year — only to be involved in a heat race crash on his first night out. A year later, after a setup experiment, he’s back in victory lane, with a win last Saturday at Grandview Speedway.
(For more on Kellner’s return to racing, read “Jon Kellner: First Race Back After 10 Years Didn’t Go as Planned.”)
“We ran with coil-overs last season,” Kellner, of Lake Wallenpaupack, Pennsylvania, said. “We were average at best, so over the winter my son Mike and I decided to switch to torsion bars.”
Coil-over setups became predominant in Northeastern-style modifieds while Kellner took his sabbatical from the sport. However, using old-and-tried ways didn’t seem to work. His best finish was a 19th.
“We just couldn’t get the car with torsion bars to be competitive,” said Kellner. “A torsion-bar car is easier to drive than a coil-over car. The coil-over [setup] is not easy to drive because it is a better suspension, which means the car is faster. We figured we would need to run coil-overs — just about everyone is on coil-overs at Grandview.”
After returning his Bicknell modified to a coil-over setup, Kellner found speed. Enough speed to lead to his first win in 11 years.
“The win felt beyond good,” Kellner said. “No driver knows if he can win up there on any given week. It is very competitive, and very hard to get to the front. All you can do is try every week, and hope for the best.”
As far as the torsion-bar experiment, Jon Kellner’s going to shelve that one.
“I’m sticking with coil-overs,” said Kellner. “I struggled with the speed but won on the first night out [on coil-overs]. Hopefully, we are going to keep it going in the right direction.”
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.
