200+ Cars
The third NERRC event took place Friday and Saturday, June 14-15 at Limerock Park. NER’s only LRP race for the season, and drivers took advantage of that fact and showed up for this Father’s Day weekend combined NERRC and NE Divisional event.
Prior to the weekend start, almost 207 drivers registered to compete on the historically difficult and fast 1.5-mile track in Connecticut. Some no-shows are always the case, but at the end of the day, 194 competitors put wheels on the track as one of the 7 race groups.
As expected, the Miatas, ITs and Production classes had the largest groups, with 37 cars in their sessions. But all classes were well represented, with no fewer than 20 in a group. Even the SRFs had 24 cars in their stand-alone class.
Lots of Racing Action
With so many cars and such a short track, there was plenty of racing action over the weekend during the Qualifying Sprints on Friday and the two races on Saturday. Unfortunately, much of this racing action led to more than a few cars having their weekends cut short due to on-track incidents. For the first time in my twenty years of racing, we saw not just one, but TWO, red flags during racing on Saturday. Sessions were shut down due to track blockage that required extensive clean up. It was not an uncommon sight to see cars being manhandled onto trailers Saturday evening.
Those unfortunate incidents aside, the rest of the drivers put on a great show for the workers, crews and spectators that came out to enjoy another beautiful weekend weather-wise, and some quality divisional and regional racing.
Race Highlights
Watching the GT1s at Limerock is always a treat, and this weekend we got to watch #55 Eric Curran in his Mustang and #6 Frank Cioppettini in his Camero. The over 20 FVs on the track had three different winners for each race with #39 Pete Meck taking the final divisional win. Groups 3 and 7 had similar results. #77 Mark Gregory in STL won both the Qualifying Sprint and Race 1, then came in second for Race 2 to #68 Craig McHaffie. Same thing with SRF3 in Group 7. #12 Steve Introne lost the final Saturday afternoon divisional race in SRF3 after lapped traffic gave #0 James Regan the advantage and he jumped on it with 2 laps to go.
#84 FC John Dole and #111 SM Johnathan Goring both swept the weekend winning every race in Group 4 and 5 respectively. Finally, Group 6 saw the only new track record set for the weekend. #9 Jesse Schmidt changed the record books in T3 on Saturday morning during Race 1 with a new time of 1:01.383.
All the final results from Qualifying and the Qualifying Sprint on Saturday and both races on Sunday can be found here.
Current standings for the NERRC series are here, as well as the NE Divisional Standings here.
Photos by James Ray
To see all of James’s images from the weekend, visit his gallery here.
Paddock Crawl
As the event is named, this Limerock weekend hosts NER’s annual Paddock Crawl. This worker, driver, crew and family event started a few years ago and has quickly become one of the highlights for the season with everyone. Imagine a giant paddock pot lock, where everyone brings food and drink to share.
This year, the variety and choices were the talk of the paddock. Beyond just burgers and brats, there was smoked turkeys and hams, plenty of side dishes, and tons of desserts and sweet treats. So much food!
One of the benefits of the Paddock Crawl is the opportunity for all NER members to socialize together at the end of the day. For an end-of-day party, it regularly has the highest attendance of all road racing events. It really has become a great way to bring our members together to recap all the excitement of the day on the track and plan and prepare for the next day’s action.
Check out some of the photos from the Paddock Crawl!
What’s Next
Don’t worry about waiting too long for the next NER road racing event. NERRC #4 will be here soon on July 13-14 at Thompson Speedway for a combined Majors event. Registration is already open and we look forward to seeing you there!
