The margin of victory? 0.014 seconds. The winner? Cale Ross over Mike Maresca in the Short Track Super Series feature at Action Track USA. The kicker? Ross didn’t even know it was the last lap.
“We went all green laps after a restart on lap 28,” Ross, of Lambertville, New Jersey, said. “The track is a 1/5-mile and everything happened so quickly I just got lost in racing. I was battling Mike [Maresca] so hard, bouncing across bumps and beating my brains in that I didn’t see the white flag and didn’t know the checkered flag was waving.”
The two cars battled side by side, lap after lap.
“I was trying to get my car in front of him,” Ross said. “I know how important track position is. All I was thinking was that if I could get in front of him, I can make it hard for him to get around me.”
That didn’t happen. The race ended before Ross knew it.
“Then I saw the yellow come out,” Ross said. “The [Raceceiver] was saying, ‘Checkered, checkered, checkered.’ All I knew was that we were side by side crossing the scoring loop.”
That’s how Cale Ross won his first-ever Short Track Super Series race — and it will be one he, and many others, will remember for years to come.
“I got quite a reception after the photo finish,” Ross said. “Some of the racing people who reached out to me were Randy Williamson from Bicknell, Jeff Behrent and Billy Pauch Sr. It is a big deal for me to hear from racers and the racing industry people because I’m just a Saturday-night racer who decided to take in a Short Track Super Series event that was nearby. We don’t have a big traveling team. We race one night a week.”
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.
