From CDR
After a long and bitter cold winter of preparation, Craig Dollansky and the Big Game Treestands #7 escaped to Florida for the first night of racing action with the All Star Circuit of Champions at Volusia Speedway Park, a track Dollansky tasted victory on opening night with the All Stars in 2008 and 2010.
A field of 39 cars assembled at the semi-banked half mile oval with Dollansky turning the 19th fastest lap in qualifying with a lap of 14.011 seconds. The top 24 from qualifying were inverted into four heats which meant the Aggressive Hydraulics Maxim would start outside the front row of heat three. Riding the highside of the track going into turn one, Dollansky carried alot of momentum coming out of turn two to shoot past Lucas Wolfe for the lead and never look back as he cruised to victory by a margin of 5.8 seconds.
With the non-dash cars lined up by qualifying times for the A-Main, the Aeroquip Performance Products backed sprinter started way back in seventeenth. When the green flag dropped Dollansky started his march to the front of the field as he ran fourteenth on lap three and motored up to eighth by lap eight. When a caution came out with eight laps remaining, Dollansky had made his way up to fourth but wasn’t finished there. Using a strong restart, ‘The Crowd Pleaser’ continued to knife his way to the front of the pack as he worked past Dale Blaney and then put a big slide-job on David Gravel to assume the runner-up position. With only a handfull of laps left, Dollansky started to reel in leader, and teammate, Sammy Swindell but ran out of laps and would finish 2nd to pick up the Hard Charger award and make it a 1-2 finish for Big Game Motorsports.
‘This is a great finish for Big Game Treestands and my team of DJ, Luke and Troy. These guys work hard and to come from 17th to 2nd is not easily done with the field of competition we have here tonight,” commented Dollansky. “I’ve enjoyed having Sammy as a teammate, he’s a wealth of knowledge and great driver. We’ve been working together to try to help each team and this is just a great team effort. I’m fortunate to have great guys behind me with Tod Quiring of Big Game Treestands, Paul Johnson of Aggressive Hydraulics, Scott Boyd of Karavan Trailers, and everybody that supports this race team. Our Morrison motor was in for the first time tonight and it was just a great finish for everybody involved and we’re going to keep working hard at it!”
The DIRTcar Nationals continue tonight with the final night of All Star Circuit of Champion competition before the World of Outlaws kick off their season February 11th-13th.