~ By Tom Boggie

In recent years, it wasn’t uncommon for Mike Mahaney and the George Hutting racing team to load up their equipment and head to Florida in the spring, hoping to get some track time and get dialed in for the Northeast racing season.

This year, they opted to stay home. But don’t get all worked up. Mahaney and Hutting aren’t scaling back. They’re just being a little more conservative.

“We just figured we’d save our stuff for the regular season,” said Mahaney last Friday night at Albany-Saratoga Speedway “It was a time for us to work on our stuff for up here.”

It obviously paid off, because Mahaney drove to his first win of the season last week in the 35-lap NAPA Modified feature at Malta. After a miserable opening-night performance, when he struggled to finish 15th, Mahaney and his team got back on track in a big way.

“Last week, we weren’t fast,” the 33-year-old Mahaney said after his win. “During the week, we threw the kitchen sink at it, and were still making changes all night tonight. I’m glad it worked out.”

Mahaney’s start last Friday was just his fifth of the 2023 season, and was the first time he had finished in the top five, following a seventh at Selinsgrove, a sixth at Delaware International, a 16th at Orange County and the aforementioned 15th at Albany-Saratoga.

But he may have learned something last Friday at Albany-Saratoga.

“Those guys were racing hard early,” he said. “They were making dive bomb moves all over the place. I was taking mental notes, and I could see what I had to do if I was going to win the race.

“I’ve got a nice, new car here that I don’t like to bang up, but I guess I’ve got to, if I want to win races.”

Midway through the feature, Mahaney was running fourth and really not making any progress. “When I was sitting fourth, I wasn’t sure if I had a winning race car,” he said. “But then I had a couple of good restarts and got up to second, and knew I just needed one more to get it right.”

Mahaney got the restart he needed on lap 27, when Marc Johnson slowed to a stop on the backstretch. On that restart, Mahaney slid up in front of leader Demetrios Drellos in the second turn to block Drellos’ momentum and get the lead going down the backstretch.

In recent years, Mahaney has been as busy as any modified driver in the Northeast. As an example, he ran a total of 99 races during the 2021 season, beginning the campaign on Jan. 28 and ending on Nov. 13. As a result, he’s quickly approaching a major milestone. Heading into this weekend’s racing action, Mahaney has 996 modified starts in his 17-year career.
Heck, if he had hit the Southern Swing, he’d be there already. But staying in the Northeast for the winter may pay off in the long run.

MORE FROM MALTA
Defending track champion Matt DeLorenzo started on the outside pole last Friday, but didn’t have enough to keep pace with Mahaney and Drellos at the end, falling to a third-place finish.

“The car just gave up halfway through,” he said. “My right rear chunked up. Mahaney must have had a harder tire than we did because you could see he got better toward the end.”

Drellos was second for the second week in a row, and each time, he gave up the lead late. But I’ll say it again. His car is wicked fast.

Matt Depew put together a good seventh-place run in his new Bicknell chassis last Friday. Depew felt a vibration in the rear end of his car during hot laps and after a quick repair, asked for a second warmup session and everything was all right. His car is now sponsored by SW Motorsports. Steve Wilbur, one of Depew’s crew members, won a new Bicknell chassis in a raffle sponsored by Elmo’s Speed Shop during the winter and gave it to Depew. In checking my notes. Depew didn’t have a top-10 finish during the entire 2022 season. Last week marked his best finish at Albany-Saratoga since a seventh on July 9, 2021.

With automatic scoring and timing, dead-heats shouldn’t exist anymore. But there was one at Albany-Saratoga last Friday, when Jessey Mueller and Jeremy Pitts stopped the timer at the exact same instant when they hit the finish line in the third modified heat. They came out of the fourth turn side by side and were rubbing rails and tires all the way to starter Rich Petersen’s checkered flag. In the 35-lap feature, they finished fifth (Mueller) and sixth (Pitts), separated by just one-tenths of a second.

Remember that 6-year-old Troyer chassis that carried Tim Hartman Jr. to four sportsman championships at Malta? It’s been locked up for safe keeping. “It’s in a warehouse in Amsterdam,” said Hartman Jr. last week. “When I get a warehouse of my own, I’m going to get it out, put a body back on it and hang it from the ceiling. I love that car.”

The modifieds will be racing for $3,000 to win Friday at Malta, while both the sportsman and pro stock winners will receive $1,000 each.

John Santolin had a good run last weekend, finishing second to Dylan Grogan in the limited sportsman feature. Santolin is still looking for his first career win at Malta.

The Super DIRTcar Series kicked off last Sunday at Bridgeport, with Mat Williamson winning the 75-lapper and the top prize of $7,500. It wasn’t a good day for the Albany-Saratoga regulars who follow the series. Adam Pierson finished 12th to lead the Malta contingent, which also included Jack Lehner (14th), Peter Britten (17th), Mahaney (21st) and CG Morey (28th).

One of the big issues at Bridgeport was rough track conditions, and earlier this week, track owner Doug Rose put out a release that said he’ll be removing the new clay. “Over the off-season, we took on the project to resurface the speedway,” the release said. “Unfortunately, it is just not going as we had planned.”

AROUND THE TRACKS
Devil’s Bowl Speedway will kick off its season on Saturday, with a $3,000-to-win feature for the sportsman/modifieds. With the Bowl opening, the sportsman count at Albany-Saratoga should get down to a more manageable number, and promoter Lyle DeVore won’t feel obligated to run double features, as he’s done for the first two weekends of the season.

Ken Tremont Jr. opened some eyes at Lebanon Valley’s practice session last weekend when he brought out a new PMC chassis. Tremont Jr. has struggled to find the right coil combination with his Bicknell during the last couple of years, and obviously feels that working with old friend Pete Chuckta will be to his advantage.

Speaking of chassis switches, Andy Bachetti, the defending modified champion at the Valley, showed up at Fonda last weekend in a new DKM chassis and finished a respectable fourth in the memorial race for Jack Johnson, his late father-in-law.
The Valley is scheduled to begin its season Saturday, with the big blocks racing for $3,000 to win.

I know this doesn’t pertain to dirt track racing, but Hendrick Motorsports seems to be snake-bitten. First, Chase Elliott breaks his leg snowboarding and misses six races, and last Tuesday, Alex Bowman fractured a vertebra in a wreck in a sprint car in Iowa and will be out three to four weeks.