On Saturday night, 411 Motor Speedway owner Mitch McCarter and track officials announced during the drivers meeting that there would be a change in the way the track’s NeSmith Late Model class would qualify for their main event. Instead of staging time-trials and heat races to determine feature lineups, the track would institute a policy in which cars would be lined up for heat races based simply off the number that had been drawn during driver sign-ins.
Due to persistent rain that halted activity on the track for almost three hours, the new policy was not put into action on Saturday. Rather, cars were lined up for the feature race based of the number drawn with no qualifying or heat races. That was done due to time constraints because of the 11:00pm curfew placed on 411 by the local government.
After further consideration of the potential change McCarter took to Twitter after the race to post that time-trials will still be used, but with a new twist. Here is the full text of McCarter’s Twitter post:
“Nesmith Late Models will Qualify and Heat Race for the remainder of the 2014 season. A Top 6 Dash will be implemented.”
Previously, all Late Models would turn laps in time-trials with a certain number sometimes getting locked into a starting position with the remainder of the field sent to heat races to determine the full starting lineup.
The new format will call for all Late Models to post times in qualifying with the top-6 going to a Dash Race to set the starting order for the first three rows in the feature. Those top-6 qualifiers will draw for their starting spots in the Dash and will start the feature based off the order in which they finish that preliminary event.
All cars who qualify outside the top-6 will go to heat races, just as had previously been the case.
“Honestly, we are trying to balance the scales between the fans and the drivers,” McCarter said via text message. “The fans hate to watch qualifying. The drivers in the NeSmith Late Models don’t like the idea of drawing and heat racing. We are going to try to balance the scales and give a little of both to our customers.”
