By T.J. Buffenbarger
(August 17, 2024) — After a couple of days of wondering if we would see any racing this weekend Butler Motor Speedway pulled off a sprint car double header on Saturday night featuring their weekly 410 sprint cars joined by the touring Great Lakes Super Sprints.
Here are some takeaways from the double dip at Butler.
• If you have not come out to the race track this year to see some of the young talent racing in the Great Lakes region, you need to make it out to a race before the end of the season.
Saturday’s rain showers produced a canvas that many of those young stars used to paint stellar portraits of the talent to put on display while blasting around the high banks of Butler Motor Speedway.
Kasey Jedrzejek isn’t even old enough to have a beer at 19 years of age to celebrate his fifth feature win of the 2024 season. Saturday night Jedrzejek and Chase Dunham raged a highly entertaining battle for the second position for most of the Great Lakes Super Sprints feature until Jedrzejek got the better of Dunham and Dustin Daggett in the closing laps of the GLSS main event.
In the winged 410 sprint car feature Jett Mann kept everyone on the edge of their seats blasting through some of the bumps that developed after the street stock feature that ran between the GLSS and the 410 main event.
Even with veteran driver Van Gurley Jr. on his back bumper for the first half of the main event, Mann was able to win the race essentially with a daring three wide move splitting a pair of lapped cars going into turn one. From there it was just a matter of if Mann would trip up running four wheels in the fluff into turn one or bouncing the wrong way through turns three and four, which he did not.
Mann’s progress is impressive considering how little racing he did before getting into 360 and 410 sprint cars. With only a handful of Micro races and less than 50 starts total, Mann has shown tremendous growth in the later part of the 2024 season.
Saturday was just more proof on why I believe Jedrzejek is one of the top prospects under the age of 20 in the entire region. Next weekend will be telling with Jedrzejek racing at Attica Friday in the 410 sprint car, Waynesfield Raceway Park with the 410 and 360 on Saturday, and Sunday with the 360 again at Millstream Speedway. Jedrzerjek’s 410 program has been stronger of late and could make some noise next weekend in Ohio.
Beyond Jedrzejek and Mann there are a lot of very talented young men and women making some noise on the sprint car scene in the area.
Last night alone Keith Sheffer Jr. continued his progression in winged sprint car with a couple of solid runs, Jac Nickles who has shown speed at times this year, Max Frank making the transition with Sheffer from non-wing to winged sprint cars, Kelsey Ivy who has been landing on the podium of late, Abby Holbein that has shown speed at times this year along with some of the other drivers that raced elsewhere due to the less than promising forecast such as Darin Naida and Corbin Gurley.
It has been incredible to see this much young talent in the area throughout the season. Many of these drivers are talented enough to be moving onto bigger and better things, so I highly advise all of you to take in a few races before the end of the year to see some of them in action.
• While the young talent were the stars of the show on Saturday, several of the veteran drivers were impressive as well.
Since adding Fuzz Lyons to his race team, Van Gurley Jr. has driven more confidently and put on a solid run on Saturday night. If not for Mann’s four in the fluff, three wide through lapped traffic drive Gurley likely would have landed in victory lane again this season.
Gurley will openly admit now over the age of 50 he is in better shape today than when he was racing professionally in the mid-90’s. Saturday Gurley drove a very smart, yet aggressive race to land on the podium.
Jason Blonde somehow seems to defy age, bouncing through the holes and ruts at Butler with the same vigor as he did at 19 years of age.
While Blonde’s car did not hold up to him wheeling it on Saturday, it would have been interesting to see how the feature would have played out in the 410 race has Blonde’s had not broken an axle early on the main event.
Dustin Daggett also had one of the most impressive runs I’ve seen out of him at Butler, which he would openly admit is not his best circle of dirt. Daggett led a vast majority of the main event and was doing a great job of handling slower traffic to keep Jedrzejek and Dunham behind him.
• As I turned towards Butler Motor Speedway on Saturday near Tekonsha, Michigan the road started to show more moisture to the point where there was water standing inside of the rumble strips.
Once I arrived at Butler I found out there was a large rain shower that hit the facility about 40 minutes after I started my drive to the track. Throughout the day the weather map in the lower peninsula looked like the poster child for scattered showers with small, but heavy blotches of rain throughout the state moving in a circular pattern.
Nobody would have blamed Tim Wilber and his team for calling off Saturday’s event. Instead, they forged ahead, wisely not choosing to open the track up until after the rain shower and sent a message that for some of their bigger shows they are going to be willing to stick things out through a little rain.
If it wasn’t for some early destruction in the 410 sprint car feature that required some extensive cleanup, the show would have been over at a decent hour. Even with the late run both features were highly entertaining to watch.
Wilber and his family continue to chip away with small improvements to the racing program. All the Butler officials were outfitted in sharp looking uniforms and there were more push trucks and wreckers on hand to handle sprint car pushing and crash cleanup. Those were just two of the things I noticed on Saturday as Wilber and their family continue to work on improving the high banked 3/8-mile facility.
Three years in and from all appearances Wilber seems as enthusiastic about running Butler as he was when I walked in the gates three years ago to check out the buzz some of the local teams were talking about. Hopefully for all of us that enthusiasm doesn’t dim anytime soon, and we can look forward to seeing what is going to happen next at Butler.