It’s hard to teach a dog new tricks, they say, and Robbie Emory might agree. He had raced 12 years in late models. When Emory moved into sportsman modifieds at the end of last season, he decided to apply what he knew in late models. It worked. He won the Short Track Super Series race on July 14 at Bridgeport Motorsports Park.
“Everyone still scales their cars,” Emory said of the sportsman class. “For me, scales are hard to understand. I come from a world that uses spring smashers — I understand spring smasher numbers. I had to come up with numbers that work for me in a sportsman.”
Emory races a 2018 Bicknell with a coil suspension.
“We set out to get the weight on the right rear as the car is moving,” Emory, of Milton, Delaware, said. “As the car moves, we use different settings — spring rates and shock valving — to take up the load and to rotate better under the left rear.”
Emory started racing sportsman modifieds after car owner Sam Mast asked him to drive his car at Delaware International Speedway. He found the new car to be a new challenge.
“The sportsman has 250 less horsepower than the late model and drives completely different,” Emory said. “The late model setup has more to do with the front end and has way more aero.”
Nevertheless, Emory thought he could use a spring smasher to create a setup for the sportsman modified. He spent the off-season putting his spring smasher to work, trying out different combinations.
Emory debuted his spring smasher-developed setup in March and has fine-tuned his setup throughout the year. Robbie Emory proved it worked with the win at Bridgeport.
“I went off on my own,” Emory said. “When I bounced my ideas off of people, they said, ‘No way it would that work,’” Emory said. “A lot of what everyone said wouldn’t work has worked, and now we are in victory lane.”
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.
