It didn’t seem like anything was stopping Amanda Angstadt from her first slingshot victory at Action Track USA. Not even a bent front axle—and with a win, she doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to change it.
“We’ll just wait until it gets worse,” Angstadt, of Reading, Pennsylvania, said. ‘I guess the axle is good the way it is because I won.”
A week before, Angstadt hit an infield tire, which bent her axle.
“It happened early in the evening, but I just kept on going,” said Angstadt. “I figured I would just race until it got worse, but it never did.”
Angstadt moved into slingshots from .25 midgets four years ago. She’s earned wins at Shellhammer Dirt Track and the Speedway at PagodaMC, but victory eluded her at Action Track USA. In fact, Angstadt had record just one podium finish, a second, in four years of trying at the Pennsylvania dirt oval. The lack of success didn’t deter her, though.
“It is the competition that keeps me coming back,” Angstadt said. “Competition makes you a better driver and drives you to be better.”
Besides the competition, the track offers a challenge, too.
“The track is different every time you race there,” said Angstadt. “It makes us keep trying different things in our setup to get better. We’ve come a long way but we have a little more to go.”
Amanda Angstadt races at a variety of tracks in the Pennsylvania area, pretty much anywhere that runs slingshots. She finally cracked victory lane at Action Track USA. Now Angstadt will be chasing her second win—and she hasn’t swapped out that bent front axle yet.
“I never thought I would be in victory lane at Action Track USA — ever!” Angstadt said. “There is so much good competition we always struggle at Action Track USA.”
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.
