Hindley’s Race Future Unlimited
Spokane’s Tom Hindley could use a few tips from short-track auto racers these days. The hydroplane racer is preparing for his first official unlimited competition Sunday at man-made Firebird Lake in Phoenix, Ariz.
It’ll be his first outing racing in tight quarters on an unlimited hydroplane “short-track” oval.
The course is ringed like an oval track, with a wall. That’s the reason Hindley might want be hanging out with stock-car racers before hitting the water with his 2-ton, 30-foot, 200-mph boat.
Designed primarily with drag boats and smaller hydro racing vehicles in mind, Firebird will launch a new race in the Phoenix market. The Firebird venue is temporary. Should the event be a success, the race site will switch to an area reservoir where a resort is under construction, Hindley said.
“Boats are not used to racing with walls,” Hindley said of the course that is just 800 feet wide - shoreline to shoreline - and features a 25-foot-wide island down the middle. “What this race amounts to is running inside the buoy line of a normal lake or river course,” Hindley said as he prepares for his initial outing in Fred Leland’s “U 99.9.”
Normally, an unlimited race course measures 1,000 feet between the entrance and exit buoys on the turns. And then there’s a considerable distance to shore from there.
The track will force a change in the way the race will be run. Only two boats will run at a time in four-lap heats.
Firebird hosted a traditional unlimited race in 1974, when officials learned the hard way that four- and fiveboat heats would not work. Pay ‘N Pak driver George Henley accidentally beached his boat on the island.
“It would be nice to race someplace where there were no walls, but I’ll go ahead and do what the boss (Leland) tells me,” Hindley said.
“This a a high-risk deal and some of the owners are not really happy about agreeing to run here,” Hindley said. “The rest of the season is pretty easy after this one.”
The 1995 unlimited schedule: June 4: Detroit (Gold Cup); June 18: Kansas City; June 25: Evansville, Ind.; July 2: Madison, Ind.; July 29: Tri Cities; Aug. 6: Seattle; Sept. 17: San Diego; Oct. 15: Honolulu.
NHRA season opens
The chase for a National Hot Rod Association drag racing championship begins this weekend when a contingent of Spokane racers heads south to Boise’s Firebird Raceway.
Father and son team Rod and Todd Hoerner, and James Arsenault will all be competing in Super Gas, while Jody Peterson will run in Super Street. Hoerner won the division’s Super Gas title in 1993.
Spokane racers have had limited luck in the Division 6 opener in the past, due in part, Rod Hoerner says, because many of the competitors already have one or two races under their belts.
One thing that Hoerner hopes will help local racers efforts will be improvements at the quarter-century old track. “”They’ve doubled the concrete launching pad and now have 400 feet,” Hoerner said. ###
Pit stops
Sand drag racing opens Saturday and Sunday at the ORV Park, with the first of a six-race schedule of the Northwest Off-Road Racing Association. NORRA will host a National Sand Drag event at the track in July… . Mechanical problems kept Spokane’s NASCAR Supertruck entry of Enerjetix Motorsports out of last weekend’s race at Tucson. The series moves on to Saugus Speedway this weekend… . Spokane Raceway Park goes for three races in a row with drags and stock cars on an Easter Sunday afternoon program… . Stateline Speedway races Sunday beginning at 1 p.m… . Empire Raceway holds a racers’ jamboree Sunday.
Paul Delaney can be reached at (509) 928-6998.