IMCA sport mod driver Coy Vlies had a dream season. It started with four consecutive wins and ended with an unbelievable victory earned off turn 4 on the final lap. The year culminated with his first IMCA Northern Sport Mod national title.
The four wins to start the year at Luxy Raceway sparked the track to place a bounty on Coy. Undeterred, Coy added three more wins and the track actually paid him the $1500 bounty.
“We just started out the year to win a feature or two, and maybe win a big race,” Coy says. “Winning four in a row got us thinking. Then, winning seven got us hopeful. Winning 15, we knew we had a shot at it.”
Coy frequented Luxy and 141 Speedway, two tracks near his home of Casco, Wisconsin, but he needed more races and more points to contend for a national title. In the second half of the season, he and his father, Jeff “Pepe” Vlies, hauled their sport mod more than 6000 miles to chase a championship.
He battled neck and neck in points with Jarett Franzen. The two battled at Jarett’s home track of Maquoketa Speedway, where Coy beat him. Then the rivals both showed up at Redwood Speedway at the end of September.
“I needed a win to be national champion,” Coy says. “I was going down the backstretch, last lap, and thinking a good run would give me second, a chance [at the championship], depending on where Jarett was behind me.”
Then the unthinkable happened.
“In a split second I had to process what was happening in front of me,” Coy says. “I was third coming out of the fourth turn when the front two cars made contact with a lapper. I steered and went up on the track to avoid them.”
Coy Vlies won the race, win No. 19, and the championship.
“It was the wildest thing that ever happened in my life,” Coy says. “Just crazy. That’s all I can say.”
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.
