PORT ROYAL, Pa. – When the calendar flips to September, Lance Dewease knows how to find a competitive advantage.
On Saturday night at Port Royal Speedway, the National Sprint Car Hall of Famer exploited his hallmark bottom groove to win the 25-lap main event from the 12th-starting spot.
The win stood as Dewease’s eighth of the year and first since July 2 when he won the Mitch Smith Memorial at Williams Grove Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Pa. Now he has the momentum he needs as he chases his eighth Tuscarora 50 title next Saturday.
“We were pretty good all night, I thought,” Dewease said, his mind set on how he needs to improve before next week’s Tuscarora 50. “We’re still fighting a bit of a dirty air issue, being around other cars. Maybe everybody has the same problem and they just don’t talk about it.
“If we can get that fixed up, we’ll be a little better I think,” he added. “For the Tuscarora 50, you need to get better. You have a lot of lapped traffic. You can’t get tight around them because they’ll slow you up. We need to get that area worked on and try to get it fixed.”
Dewease had to improvise for win No. 119 at the half-mile clay oval. He ran around the last half of the Juniata County Fair opener with no brakes. Still, it didn’t keep him from outclassing the 31-car field.
Nobody kept pace with the driver of Don Kreitz’s No. 69K once he put on the burners after restarting sixth with 15 laps to go. Five laps later, he cleared T.J. Stutts off turn four, well on his way to victory.
Part of the reason Dewease went two months between wins was because his nights started rather slowly.
It appeared that way on Saturday when Dewease only went fifth to third in his heat race. He wasn’t the only frontrunner who hadn’t positioned themselves.
Anthony Macri’s power steering line jarred loose two laps into his heat race. That forced him to pull off the track and rally from the tail of the B-Main. Macri started 23rd and eventually climbed to eighth in the feature.
Curt Stroup led the first eight laps before Stutts executed an aggressive slide job for the lead on lap nine. A caution for debris on lap 10 stacked things back up.
That’s when Dewease blasted to the front, driving by Stroup, Ryan Smith, and Mike Wagner for second.
He got by Stutts shortly after. Dewease needed to execute one more restart with two laps to go when a flat tire dropped Danny Dietrich out of the sixth position.
While Brent Marks tried to make something happen from third on the ensuing restart and get by Stutts, Mike Wagner drove by both of them to finish second.
It was Wagner’s first podium finish since he won at the track on May 22.
“You could run the middle, bottom, wherever you need to go tonight,” Wagner said. “I like a wide race track. But yeah, Lance is just really good.”
Marks finished third while Brian Brown charged to fourth from 17th. Stutts slipped to fifth, while Ryan Smith, Logan Wagner, Macri, Stroup, and Dylan Cisney completed the top 10.