Opening Night at Ventura Looks More Like Enduro

VENTURA — Ventura Raceway’s stock car season opened with a bang Friday night.

Literally.

The bang of blown engines and blown tires.

IMCA sprint cars were supposed to be the feature event, but only three entrants showed up, and two of them blew their engines before the start of the seven-lap heat race, turning it into an exhibition run for Ventura’s Randy Moody.

When the main event rolled around, Paul Hewlett didn’t start, and Tracy Van Blargen of Camarillo had his car stall in a puff of white smoke in the first turn, so Moody headed back to the pits and called it a night.

Van Blargen restarted, and insisted that he wanted to race despite the obvious oil leak, and ended up running four laps under full power, trailing a cloud of white smoke all the way.

Defending champion Paul Moore of Oak View won the 20-lap Street Stock main event after a solid second place finish in his heat.

Moore ran the first half of the main bumper-to-bumper behind James Weston of Santa Barbara, until Weston’s tire shredded midway through the race to force a yellow caution flag.

By the time racing resumed, Weston had replaced the tire and rejoined the field at the rear of the pack.

Weston moved from 12th to fifth by the last lap, only to hit a pothole that popped another tire.

Bill Lauer of Santa Maria ran away with the 12-lap IMCA Modified main, nearly a quarter of a lap ahead of Ventura’s Doug Thornton.

Defending champion Scott Boucher of Oak View won the 15-lap Pony Stock main event.

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The NASCAR Southwest Tour makes its first of two seasonal visits to Saugus Speedway tonight with a 100-lap main event. Racing begins at 7.