~ By Tom Boggie

I don’t know about anyone else, but after watching Demetrios Drellos in last Friday night’s season-opener at Albany-Saratoga Speedway, I think he’s on to something.

Even though Drellos fell victim to an incredible crossover move by Peter Britten going into the third turn on lap 38 of the 40-lapper and had to settle for second, he was upbeat and positive after the race, and for good reason.

His car was super-fast. If the feature had been the regular distance of 35 laps, he would have won easily. Every time he came out of the second turn, he got a huge run down the backstretch and was leaving Britten in his wake.

Rarely do drivers share everything they know with me, but when I tracked Drellos down after the feature, we had a short talk outside his hauler that began by him saying, “Let me tell you a story.”

“I had the late model in the shop during the winter next to the modified, and we had no bodies on either car,” he said. “We started looking at each car and making comparisons. When we went to Florida, we fabricated a new rear back half for the modified. We put some of our own stuff in it, and it worked. It took a couple of nights, but we found out that cars can be different. They don’t have to be cookie-cutters.”

If you remember, Drellos had a second-place finish to Mat Williamson on the second night of the DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia County Speedway in Florida in February (Williamson ate up a lot of ground and passed Drellos on the last lap for the win), after finishing fifth on opening night in the series.

Drellos’ appearance at Albany-Saratoga last Friday was his third race in as many nights. He was behind the wheel of his Rocket chassis late model on both Wednesday and Thursday, finishing eighth at Delaware International speedway on Wednesday before getting a Did Not Qualify at Georgetown on Thursday.

“I tore the nose off during qualifying at Georgetown,” he said last Friday. “Rookie mistake.”

He said that adding late model racing to his schedule has been a big boost for his race team.
“Being in the late model had helped us stay so fresh,” he said. “It’s like we turned on a switch. The team is operating at 110 percent right now.”
Drellos has already won a late model feature. After finishing second to Michael Page in his debut with the DIRTcar Late Models Series at the Sunshine Nationals on Jan. 19, he was awarded the win when Page was disqualified.

Even though he’s only 26, Drellos is no stranger to success. He’s won modified races at three of the four Capital Region tracks (still winless in rare appearances at Glen Ridge), and pulled off one of the biggest upsets in recent history when he led flag-to-flag to win the 100-lap Super DIRTcar Series race at Albany-Saratoga in 2019, taking home the top prize of $10,000.

A lot of his success has come at Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Vermont, where he has 11 career wins and won the modified/sportsman championship in 2020. Among his victories that season was a win in the Vermont 200, which gave him $10,876 in purse and lap money.

And now, it looks he might have found something that no one else has. In four modified starts this season, he’s finished fifth, second, 13th and second. It will be very interesting to see what he can do when Albany-Saratoga returns to handicapping the modifieds and he has to start deep in the field.

ON TO BRITTEN
The standing-room-only crowd at Albany-Saratoga went nuts last Friday when Britten pulled a slide job on Drellos with two to go (there are still a lot of fans at Malta with long memories of Drellos’ on-track incidents with Ken Tremont Jr. in 2017 and 2018) and came away with his second straight opening-night victory. But Britten admitted after the race that he wasn’t sure if he could catch Drellos.

“I was just trying to hold my spot, trying not to kill myself,” he said after the win. “I could see it was getting easier to stay with him. When I finally got to him, I didn’t know if I should go to the bottom or let him make the first move. He made the first move, and I got him. But those deals can go either way.”

Britten started on the pole and led the first seven laps, but wasn’t comfortable out front.
“I sort of hate it when I start on the pole,” he said. “You don’t know where to go.”

Drellos used a restart on lap eight to take the lead away from Britten, and then the Aussie settled in.

“He showed me the line, and I had to follow him,’ Britten said. “I’d been racing low, and I really didn’t want to go up there, I was nervous about running the top, but I knew I had to. I was losing time running the bottom, and he was so strong.”
But in the end, it was Britten who was in victory lane.

MORE MALTA NOTES
Keith Flach won his heat race, but his motor started smoking on the last lap and he was done for the night, skipping both the modified Dash for Cash and the feature.

Drellos was a casualty during the dash, damaging the right rear spindle, but had plenty of time to make repairs before the feature.

Don Ronca brought out the red flag during the feature when he slammed into the implement tires guarding the end of the Jersey barrier in the first turn. Ronca’s car caught some air and wound up sitting on top of the tire, with all four wheels off the ground.

Luke Horning debuted a new Playfab pro stock chassis, putting him on coils for the first time, and to say “Cousin Luke” had an eventful night would be an understatement. He was battling for third during his heat race but then hit the inside barrier in turn two and wound up getting into a tangle with another car between the third and fourth turns, forcing him to the pits. That put Horning in the 19th starting spot in the feature. He worked his way up to sixth after just eight laps, but his left flat tire went flat while the field was under caution on lap eight, and again, he had to pit. He worked his way back up to third by lap 17, went by second-place runner Jason Casey on lap 22 and then did a slide job on Jay Corbin to get the lead on lap 23. When Horning stopped his car on the front straightaway for pictures, Corbin, who had started on the pole and looked like he had the win locked up until Horning’s late charge, pulled up alongside to let Horning know how he felt.

Eric Mack, the co-founder of DKM Fabrications, is back behind the wheel of a sportsman for the first time since 2015, The DKM chassis that he’s racing is owned by Pete LeClair, whose son Gerard raced the car last year. But when Gerard moved out of the area, Mack and Pete LeClair struck a deal for Mack to return to racing. He finished 14th in one of the sportsman features.

Tim Sears Jr. made the most of a bad situation Friday. Sears got caught up in an incident with Chris Bisson in the first modified heat, and had to move on to the consy. He won the first of two last-chance qualifiers, really getting hooked up on the outside with about four laps to go. He started 20th in the feature, but after 40 laps, had worked his way to 10th.

Sears Jr. was the only top-10 finisher who started outside the top 10. Canadian invader Mathieu Desjardins made the biggest charge, coming from 28th to finish 12th.

How tough was the modified field? Jimmy Phelps, who got a win during Malta Massive Weekend last fall, didn’t even qualify. He was added to the field, started 30th and finished 25th.