RPM MOTORSPORTS: Renewed Optimism For Hoar
Recent Devil’s Bowl Speedway Win Has Team Ready For 100-lap Event
Brian Hoar left Devil’s Bowl Speedway last weekend in a completely different frame of mind than he did when he last visited the half-mile Vermont oval in mid-May.
Hoar won the 30-lap NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Late Model feature event at Devil’s Bowl on Friday night, his final tuneup before the I Am Vermont Strong 100 at the track this weekend. It’s the second race in the four-race Vermont State Championship Series being contested this season between Devil’s Bowl and Thunder Road International Speedbowl.
“I’ve got to tell you, the car was probably good enough to win again this weekend,” said Hoar, an eight-time ACT Late Model Tour champion from Williston, Vt. “I’d love to have the exact same car this weekend. It was that good. Sure, you want to make some adjustments to it, but sometimes when you try to make improvements, you end up going the opposite way without meaning to.
“But, yeah, I’d love to have it the same way again.”
That’s a marked change for Hoar, who finished a disappointing 11th in the ACT Spring Green 112 at Devil’s Bowl on May 12. The entire RPM Motorsports No. 37 GossCars.com Dodge team left Devil’s Bowl that weekend perplexed by an ill-handling car.
Just one year earlier, they’d won the inaugural ACT race on the new asphalt surface at Devil’s Bowl.
“The track is still new,” Hoar said, “and guys are obviously learning how to drive their cars better and set their cars up better there. The competition all got stiffer in a year’s time. They’d all been there, got to race there, made adjustments and they came back with better setups than they had the year before. A lot of them probably had an advantage on us this year in that sense.”
But Hoar and crew chief Rick Paya closed that gap in a hurry last weekend.
They had intended on only practicing during the day at Devil’s Bowl Friday while helping Hoar’s father, Doug, run an RPM car in the Late Model feature. But after being so good in practice, track owner Mike Bruno urged Hoar to compete – and compete he did, besting the largest field of Late Models (24) in track history.
“We changed the car all around (from the Spring Green),” Hoar said. “We were trying a lot of different things to see if we could make some improvements. I think we had a decent baseline, but we also realized where we’d gone wrong in ACT Spring Green.
“Devil’s Bowl is pretty unique, in that it’s very flat. We’ve always gone in thinking it was a lot like Airborne (Speedway in Plattsburgh, N.Y.) but it’s a lot flatter. We kind of had a new outlook on the track and a new thinking going there. We just figured we’d go with no points and no pressure and try some different things. Obviously, we found something that worked.”
The victory in the main event was the second NASCAR-sanctioned win of Hoar’s career and the first in a weekly short-track division. His previous NASCAR win came in what is now the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East at Thunder Road in 2003.
Hoar won’t be thinking about NASCAR points this Friday night, June 8, when qualifying for the I Am Vermont Strong 100 begins at 7 p.m.
“It was a pretty neat deal that Thunder Road and Devil’s Bowl got together for this State Championship series this year,” he said. “It was a great idea by (Thunder Road owner Tom Curley) and Mike Bruno, and they put it together. Our team has always supported the extra-distance races and the big-money races, and we’ve been very supportive of Devil’s Bowl being an asphalt track. Those guys are doing a fantastic job.
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