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| Added: 24 Feb 2016 |
Category: Older Oval Racing |
| And the year was..... 2009 |
2009 seen the first staging of the Lightning Rod World final in Northern Ireland which was won by Stephen Emerson. Andy Best won the 2 Litre European at the Nuttscorner Oval Speedweekend, Wayne Woolsey retained the 2 Litre Hot Rod World final when it was staged at Hednesford.
Nutts Corner Shale Arena also came and went within the space of 3 meetings and the ProStocks arrived on the scene.
2009 was a year in which I didn’t venture too far from Nutts Corner, I took in most of the Nuttscorner Oval meetings, all three of the Nutts Corner Shale Arena meetings and aside from that was only at Ballymena once for the New Years day meeting and only had the one trip to the mainland, which was my first visit to Ipswich for the Thunder 500 followed by Northampton the next day.
Back in 2009 the New Years day meeting at Ballymena was the pick of the festive meetings attracting most of the National Hot Rodders from NI as well as visitors from the South and Wilson Hamilton came to race with his Colt. The Stock Rods also seen full grids of cars with lots of support from Tipperary cars at the time.
Shamwreck was the first big meeting of the local season and it was Karly Day who took the win. Supporting Shamwreck on the day was the NI debut for the ProStocks, which about 8-12 cars in action most of which ended up in a pile in the middle of the straight and nearly wiped the entire class out in one go. The opening ProStock race was won by Ryan Fleming and the other heat and final went to Steffan McClelland.
Moving on to June and the F2 Northern Ireland trip it was Chris Bradbury who took the Irish Open Championship at Nutts Corner and the Challenge Trophy at Ballymena.
All the F2 chat in June was about the new Shale track, something that seemed to be a rumour for quite some time before it came to be a reality and held it’s first meeting in 2009. The opening meeting featured grass racers, Bert Finniken in a UK Modified and Carlos Perez in a BriSCA F1 as well as F2’s National Bangers, and a class I think was called shale stox which included Production cars and ProStock type cars.
At the start of July Carl Boardley won his last National Hot Rod World final (at the time of writing) leading home Glenn Bell at Ipswich.
Nuttscorner Oval’s Speedweekend included the Lightning Rod world final which was being staged in Northern Ireland for the first time and was won by Stephen Emerson. Alongside the Lightning Rod World, the 2.0 Hot Rods raced for their European Championship which was won by Andy Best.
The 2.0 Hot Rod World final was staged at Hednesford for the first time and only time to date that I’m aware of, Wayne Woolsey retained the gold roof.
At the end of August is fairly bleak conditions the shale track held it’s third and what would be it’s final meeting. Unlike the previous meetings there had been very little talk about it and from memory most people weren’t sure if it was even on or off. It was a very wet day and there was only really F2’s and Shale Stox racing and even though there was further meetings scheduled for the shale track it did have a “this is it” kind of feel about it. I still think it’s a shame as shale racing is regarded as much cheaper than tar and it could have been a real shot in the arm to F2’s here, you only need to look at the Dutch scene in recent years to see the benefit of shale racing for the sport.
In September Mickey Brennan won his first F2 world at Buxton in the year Rob Speak returned to F2’s. Back home Andy Holtby became the first visiting driver since 2000 to win the NHR British Championship in Northern Ireland when he took the title at Nuttscorner Oval in one of the nicest Tigra NHR’s there is ever likely to be.
As the season drew to a close there was Irish Championship wins for Shane Murray (2.0 Hot Rods), Derek McMillan (Junior Productions), Davy Morrison (ProStocks), Lightning Rods (David Hearst) and Ian Bolton (Reliant Robins).
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