GAS CITY, Ind. – On a rare Monday night appearance for USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship racing, Logan Seavey grabbing the headlines has become the most common of occurrences.
The Sutter, Calif., racer went back-to-back on multiple levels during Monday’s NOS Energy Drink Indiana Sprint Week by AMSOIL event at Gas City I-69 Speedway, which had been postponed by rain from the previous Friday night.
Seavey not only repeated his Gas City Indiana Sprint Week feature win from a year ago, but also captured his second victory in the series within a 24-hour span after topping the field at Lawrenceburg Speedway on Sunday night in his Baldwin-Fox Racing/Fox Paving – Claxton Engines/DRC/Claxton Chevy.
Seavey raced from the fourth starting position to the lead on the second lap of Monday’s 30-lap main event after rocketing past race leader Jake Swanson. Seavey persevered on a giddy-up quarter-mile surface which had been hammered by a substantial amount of rainfall over the weekend, leading the final 29 laps and requiring a set of proverbial spurs to get the job done.
“What a different Gas City then I had ever seen,” Seavey exclaimed. “I’ve only been here a handful of times and I honestly had no idea where I needed to be on the racetrack. I didn’t know if anybody was close; it felt like there was someone on me the whole time. I felt like I couldn’t put together two laps the same. I think that’s just how the racetrack was. It was a ‘cowboy up’ place.”
Monday’s Gas City race was the fourth of its kind in the 34-year history of Indiana Sprint Week. Just three previous Monday ISW installments had been held coming into the night with J.J. Yeley winning at Twin Cities Raceway Park in 2002; Dave Darland at Kokomo Speedway in 2012; and C.J. Leary at Gas City in 2017.
Just like Leary did four years prior, Seavey followed Sunday’s Lawrenceburg winning performance with a Monday encore that also resulted in victory at Gas City, making for a most-successful double-dip for the 2018 USAC National Midget driving champion.
Jake Swanson, the runner-up to Seavey one night earlier, shot to the lead on the initial lap around the outside of pole sitter Jason McDougal in turns one and two as McDougal and the third-place car of Tye Mihocko snagged their right rear into the crevice on the bottom groove.
However, Swanson’s lead wasn’t long for the world with Seavey shooting the gap between Swanson and McDougal exiting turn four, leaving Seavey just inches away from being in the lead at the stripe. Seavey carried his momentum to the bottom of turn one, then slid up in front of Swanson to complete the pass for position by turn two on lap two.
Ten laps in, Seavey had built himself a cushy lead of nearly five seconds and was a little more than a full straightaway ahead of Swanson and approaching tje early stages of battling traffic.
Eighth-starting Brady Bacon had already made his way into the third spot in the first-third of the race and had gotten the diamond pattern game going strong where he entered high in turn one, slowed, rotated and pitched the car sideways to where he was able to travel in a straight line from the top of turn one to the bottom exiting turn two without scrubbing speed.
On the 11th lap, Bacon shined on like a crazy diamond by streaming past Swanson for the second position and began the process of trying to track down Seavey. However, Bacon received a sliver of hope in his pursuit of Seavey when ninth running Chase Jones spun to a stop between turns three and four to bring out the caution.
Now positioned right on the rear bumper of Seavey for the lap 12 restart, Seavey ended any notion of a Bacon challenge with a tremendous restart to distance himself from Bacon by a straightaway until hitting lapped traffic once again within the final 10 lap stanza.
Once in the throng of the back end of the field, the game at hand for Seavey was the prevention of making a detrimental mistake that allowed Bacon to capitalize. Bacon managed to move himself within a couple car lengths of the lead behind Seavey, but not much more than that while Seavey was demonstratively lifting his left rear on the entry into turn one to escape the breathing down his neck courtesy of Bacon while a wall of potential challengers stood ahead between he and his fourth career USAC AMSOIL National Sprint Car feature win during the final laps.
“I knew the slightest mistake could cause me to lose a second in a hurry,” Seavey explained. “I was driving really hard the whole race, and at the end, I was really getting nervous because I wasn’t gaining on the lapped cars as much as I thought I would. I didn’t know if something was working different. I wasn’t very good on the bottom either so I just kind of committed to blowing through the holes there. She biked a few times, but (Crew Chief) Derek (Claxton) has this car so good and so stable that I’m able to do that and that’s what won us the race tonight.”
Seavey executed with precision and without a notable hiccup or miscue that could have been taken advantage of, winning by a .788-second margin over Brady Bacon, Kyle Cummins and Jake Swanson while Jason McDougal rounded out the top-five.
Brady Bacon turned in another patented consistent run that increased his point lead in both the USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship standings as well as in the Indiana Sprint Week title race.
“We tightened up quite a bit because we knew we were going to have to move around to pass quite a few good cars in front of us,” Bacon said. “We couldn’t commit to the top, so we were pretty tight and that’s how we were able to maneuver around and get to second. Once we got there and he had an open track, we didn’t quite have enough car to run up there with (Seavey). We were diamonding one and two and hoping he might mess up off two, but he never really made any mistakes, at least not big enough ones for me to capitalize on. Everyone was making some mistakes in the holes; it was hard not to. We did what we had to do, rebounding from qualifying bad, winning our heat, got a decent starting spot and passed some good cars in the feature to keep us in the hunt.”
Kyle Cummins collected KSE Racing Products / Irvin King Hard Charger honors by starting 12th and finishing third.
For complete results, click below.