South Buxton Raceway- If you stop in to visit Eren Vanderiviere, don’t be surprised if his calendar still says ‘June’ for the rest of the summer.
The Merlin driver capped the month with his third straight feature win and second consecutive three-for-three sweep in the Windride Transportation Sport Stocks on Saturday night at South Buxton Raceway.
Vanderiviere won 10 out of 12 races in June, including seven in a row, over the last three race nights. In the two races he didn’t win, he finished second to Merlin’s Steve Shaw in the June 8 feature and second to Wheatley’s Steve Clements in the June 15 crack-the-whip preliminary race.
It was Vanderiviere’s second three-feature win streak of his career, as he coincidently won the final three features in June last year.
Vanderiviere, who started the feature on the outside of the third row, moved into second on lap six and took the lead when Kingsville’s Rob Young, who led from the drop of the green, broke a tie-rod on lap 13.
Vanderiviere led the final seven laps, but he had to hold off a hard-charging Steve Clements of Wheatley in the final three laps.
“Once I got the lead, I slowed down quite a bit, but I had to get back into it a little harder when I saw he (Clements) was there,” Vanderiviere said. “I could hear him, then I saw his nose a couple of times … it made it a little more interesting for the fans.”
Wallaceburg’s Willy Vyse was third, two spots ahead of his father Gary Vyse, with Essex’s Doris Lajeunesse in the middle in fourth.
Leamington’s Joel Dick and Ridgetown’s Dale Glassford both won their second straight and third feature wins of the season.
For Dick, it was ‘deja blue’ as the Leamington driver is two-for-two in Schinkels Gourmet Meats UMP Modified features since unveiling his new blue and white paint scheme.
“The car looks good when it’s getting its picture taken,” Dick said, with a smile.
“I like it … it’s a nice change,” he said of the switch from the black and green colors.
Dick swapped the lead with Chatham’s Darryl Hoekstra several times from laps 9-19 until Hoekstra was involved in an accident on the second attempt to go green after a caution with six to go.
“It was kind of the same as last week, his car is strong down on the bottom and I found a couple of good lines up top,” Dick said of his battle with Hoekstra, a repeat of last Saturday’s feature when they finished one-two.
Hoekstra, however, was involved in another accident on the final lap while battling Belle River’s Mario Toniolo for fourth and wound up with a 10th-place finish, one spot behind Toniolo.
The late-race cautions allowed Merlin’s Jeff Daniels to pull off a second-place finish, while Essex’s Gerald Martin finished third, his best in the two years since he moved up to the Modified class. Windsor’s Dan McIntyre and Merlin’s Brad McLeod moved up to fourth and fifth place finishes after the Hoekstra-Toniolo incident.
Dick, who ran the top of the track virtually every lap, interestingly chose the bottom for the five restarts over the final six laps.
“I just wanted to take away their line and once I got my momentum, I took it back to the top,” he explained his strategy.
Rough track conditions, especially between turns one and two, also played into every driver’s strategy.
“If I hit my lines just perfect on entry, it was fairly smooth at the very top. I definitely couldn’t handle the bottom, it was just too rough.”
Glassford was happy to win a second straight Lube Tech/Great Canadian Oil Change UMP Late Models feature but he hopes it will be tough to extend his win streak this coming Saturday.
An expanded purse is expected to draw the season’s largest car count for the first Gord DeWael memorial race.
“We’re going to have the best car count of the season, and it will be our best show, so I hope we’re back here (the Winner’s Circle) next week, but it’s going to be tough,” Glassford said.
Six Late Models were on hand Saturday, as the top three put on an exciting 15-lap feature for the fans.
Chatham’s Jim Jones, who earlier in the night won the heat race for his first checkered flag of the season, led the first four laps until Glassford got by in turns three and four.
Chatham’s Brad Authier took advantage of a caution to put pressure on Glassford in the waning laps, getting his nose inside the leader between turns one and two on a couple of occasions, but could not make a clean pass.
“I tried the high side when I was chasing Jimmy and I was bouncing around, not making up any time, so once I got to the bottom, I was staying there,” Glassford said. “If those guys want to go through the bumps to get around me on the outside, all power to them, but I was not getting off the bottom.”
Authier held off Jones at the line to finish second.
One week after posting his first DNF of the season, Cottam’s Denis DeSerrano led 18 of 20 laps to win his fourth Tirecraft Mini-Mods feature of the season, his first since May 18 when he started the year winning three in a row.
“We’ve been doing a lot of winning, but it’s the first feature win in awhile,” DeSerrano said, as Saturday’s three-for-three sweep gives him a track-leading 14 checkereds for the season.
It was DeSerrano’s third sweep of the season as he has won at least one race in seven of eight race nights.
“There’s a lot of good cars out here, we just keep doing our best every week, and tonight everything worked great on the car,” said DeSerrano.
He started the feature in the third row but moved up to second before the cars came around to complete a lap.
He inherited the lead when Chatham’s Randy McKinlay had issues under caution on the third lap and was forced to pit.
Once in front, DeSerrano was committed to running the bottom, as no one could mount a challenge the rest of the way.
“In the crack-the-whip, I was saving the car for the feature and was just going to ride around the bottom, but no one passed me,” he said of lessons learned from his second win of the night. “The track was pretty decent in the feature at the start, but it started coming apart in one and two again, so I just stayed on the bottom.”
Chatham’s Rick Balasin finished second followed by Blenheim drivers Trevor Jones and brothers Kyle and Brett Hope.
Tim Anderson, of Port Colborne, stole the checkered flag out of his car owner Josh Sliter’s hands with a dramatic pass coming out of turn four on the last lap to win the Team United Sanctioning Associated (TUSA) West Canada Region Mod-Lites feature.
Sliter, who won the series first two events at Humberstone and Merrittville in May, has three second-place finishes and a third in his four trips to South Buxton in the Mod-Lites.
Previous South Buxton winners Derek Wagner, of Medina, N.Y., and Paul Klager, of Beamsville, finished third and fourth while Jeff May, of Mount Hope, was fifth.
Only eight Mod-Lites made the trip to South Buxton after Friday’s first of a double-race weekend at Ohsweken Speedway was rained out.
Along with the Gord DeWael Late Model race this Saturday, South Buxton will also have memorial races in honour of Brian Outhouse (Modifieds), Cory Schives (Mini-Mods) and Len Bryden (Sport Stocks).
From: Mike Bennett
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