By Bill W
May 23, 2016 – Mark Dobmeier and the Jimco Racing/Polaris #13 team hit Chuck Brennan’s vein of silver Saturday night at Badlands Motor Speedway near Brandon, South Dakota. Their win of the Silver Shootout at the former Huset’s Speedway paid just over $27,000 in silver bars. The Grand Forks, North Dakota driver had to work for his win, and it followed a run from 13th to seventh in the season opener at another renovated facility, the Jackson Motorplex in Jackson, Minnesota.
Saturday night’s Silver Shootout started with a tough time trial. “We timed in 12th quick,” says Mark. “We know what we did wrong though, which will help us next week. That put us behind the 8-ball a little bit, but they used passing points and we won the heat. That was enough to get us into an eight-car redraw. They have new people doing things. It took them a while and they were behind schedule, but they will get it down.”
The draw didn’t help much when Mark drew a starting spot inside row four. But it didn’t matter, as he quickly found himself amongst the leaders. “The track was really good, especially for the first night,” he says. “By feature time, it was slicked off with a big cushion on the top. There was also enough moisture on the bottom that a guy could run down there too.”
The rush to the front gave him confidence, and he found himself battling with a couple of drivers he will see a lot this year at the former Huset’s Speedway. “It really felt good, because we started a little deeper in the field,” says Mark. “We had a good car, and we passed cars right away. Things were going really well. The next thing I knew, it was a three-way battle between us, (Dusty) Zomer and (Terry) McCarl.”
Mark would gain the lead late and shoot away from the field on a restart with six laps to go to capture his 61st career win at the speedway. “Lapped traffic was really the deciding factor,” he says. “You had to be able to pick your way through them, because there were a lot of them. You had to zigzag your way through, and once we were out front, I didn’t want to give them a chance to catch me.”
On Friday at Jackson Motorplex with the NSL, Mark timed in 12th quick and won his heat race. “We started 13th in the feature and got a couple spots right away,” he says. “We tried a couple of things in Jackson setup-wise that seemed to work pretty well. We had been stuck in a rut a little bit and ran into something.”
He would climb to a solid seventh place finish. “We had a great car the whole race, but Jackson is such a big track,” says Mark. “It takes a while to reel in cars there. It was a lot of work to move up a spot. We were good through. We were able to move up to seventh. Most of those spots weren’t a gimme, so we were really happy with how fast the car was.”
The team has plans this week to run at River Cities Speedway in Grand Forks on Friday, and Badlands Motor Speedway Saturday.