For Modified fans in the Northeast from the 50's through the 70's, The Race of Champions at the Langhorne Speedway, was the biggest deal of all. Local tracks up and down the East Coast would have qualifying events that earned the winner a "Guaranteed" starting spot in the event.
Well after the 1971 race, Kmart decided to build another store, and poof, Langhorne was no more.
So the race moved to the nearby Trenton Speedway. Trenton started out as a 1/2 mile dirt fairground
type of track, then was expanded to a one mile paperclip track. In 1968, they chopped off turns 3 and 4,
then put a dogleg RIGHT hand turn at the end of the backstretch, leading into a big, sweeping banked
turn, which led into the new frontstretch, which was Twice as long as the original straight. By 1972,
the cars were packing a lot of horsepower, which meant that the speeds at the start / finish line were
horrendous.
The race format was simple: Everybody time trialed. If the 30 "guaranteed" starters were within 110% of the pole speed, they got one of the first 30 starting positions. The next 30 fastest qualifiers, got positions 31 - 60. So that took care of 60 of the 180 entries. To give everyone a last chance to make the race, they had two 20 mile consies, 60 cars in each, with the winner of each race getting one of the last two starting positions. No pressure at all.
So here comes a field of 60 cars, two by two, off the 4th turn, and the pole sitter decides to take a chance, and jumps the start. Everyone else took off after him, but by the time he got all the way down to the start/finish line, he had a 3 car length lead. Unfortunately, just as he arrived at the start / finish
line, he blew up, dumped all of his oil in the track, and locked up his rear end, turning him sideways
in front of 59 other cars, all of which were running wide open, and at max speed. With the track being quite narrow at that point, things got a bit exciting. To make a long story short, when all of the cars stopped, and the dust cleared, the whole field was in the wreck, and at least the first 30 cars were piled
up on top of each other, 3 deep! Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt, but needless to say, it took quite a while to clean up that mess. IIRC, there were maybe 25 cars that could continue, and the restart was a lot more "orderly" !
The Good Old Days...
vsrn