It seems like at Grandview Speedway, if you flip, you’ll win soon thereafter – just ask Joey Vaccaro or Logan Watt. Watt, who flipped last week went on to win his first modified feature and received a huge hug from crewmember Bill Hoffman.
(For more on Vaccaro, read “Joey Vaccaro: When the Comeback Is Bigger than the Setback.”)
The victory didn’t come easy. He started 13th and passed a car a lap until battling the leader. One of those cars he passed was his father, Ryan Watt.
“Dad was holding me back in the feature,” Watt, of Boyertown, Pennsylvania, said. “His right-rear tire didn’t fire off and he had to run the top of the track, so I cut him some slack.”
The elder Watt elected to go with an older American Racer 50 on that right rear, while Logan Watt went with some new rubber.
“It is hard to bring an old 50 back to life,” said Watt. “My tires were really fresh. Little things make a big difference in modified racing.”
Especially when you have the battle a seasoned vet like Ray Swinehart for the win. The two cleanly duked it out for several laps. Watt finally claimed the top spot with nine laps to go.
“It was tough to get by [Swinehart] — he held onto a great pace,” Watt said.
Watt started off the year strong, finishing the top five at Grandview, including a runner-up to Jeff Strunk on May 24. Then his performance fell off, culminating with a flip from a racing incident last week.
“My dad and I stepped back, put our heads down and studied our notebooks,” said Watt. “We looked at our notes from New York tracks to see what we did when they got slick. We found a baseline [we used] on Saturday.”
It obviously worked, visiting victory lane for the first time in a modified, a feat his father has repeatedly done through Watt’s childhood.
“To win at Grandview Speedway is special,” Watt said. “The atmosphere is incomparable to other tracks. The racing is so intense, and the fans are so into it, cheering so loudly. To be on top at the end of the night gives a racer needed confidence in his car and as a driver.”
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.
