When Chase Johnson was approached and asked if his 410 winged sprint car could make it around a lap of the Sonoma Raceway road course in California, he chuckled a bit.
After all, sprint cars aren’t designed to tackle right turns whatsoever, and not many will want to watch it parade around the facility at a slower speed.
“I said, ‘ah you know, probably not, maybe something smaller, though,'” Johnson said with a small laugh.
But eventually, a different idea broke through.
Johnson agreed to give the track’s 11th turn – a paperclip portion at the end of the course with a paved area between the straightaways – that would eventually turn into a temporary race track.
Johnson’s main sponsor, Price Family Dealerships, is also a presenting sponsor of the Velocity Invitational – a luxury motorsports festival held at Sonoma Raceway that brings in a number of major brands and tpes of race cars including McLaren’s IndyCar and Formula 1 teams as well as Tanner Foust and Travis Pastrana’s rally cars.
“They do a bunch of different turn off the wall stuff, just to kind of gather people in motorsports and whatnot,” Johnson said. “It was a bunch of different displays of different racing, but that’s what they had going on.”
A few weeks ago, video surfaced of Johnson testing his car out on the temporarily made race track.
The response elevated Johnson and his team’s role in the event.
“Everyone loved it,” Johnson said. “It blew up like crazy, and we were initially just going to be part of like a sideshow – opening night entertainment – but there were so many people that were interested in coming to the event, that they had to move us to a ticketed night.”
When he first heard that it would be a possibility to test on the surface, Johnson looked into pavement tires.
The USAC Silver Crown and Midget series has a number of pavement races that utilize the non-wing dirt cars with pavement tires on, but he ran into a number of issues before realizing it just wasn’t feasible.
“We were gonna put some sprint car pavement tires on there, but then I was figuring that out, then I would have to get different wheels on (the car),” Johnson said. “Then at that point, I would need different hubs and at that point it was like okay, well now you need to have different shock mounting points – it turned into a whole cluster.”
“It’s something I didn’t think I’d be doing,” Johnson said.
So Johnson threw a scuffed, left-rear tire on the right rear of his car – 410 sprint cars races with a larger right-rear tire in regular dirt races that creates the lean that fans see in photos of a car hitting the apex of the corner.
He completed the test with his used Hoosier tires – the same sets he races with, albeit a bit used up already – and found the left-rear on the right side of the car could last about 18 laps or so.
“(We) basically used just throw-away tires that aren’t good enough to make it back on the car for normal race,” Johnson said. “We can make about 30 to 40 laps on a left-rear. On the right, we could get about 18 laps, and that’s with already junked tires. I don’t know what it would be if you put a whole brand-new set on.”
Johnson compared the racing surface to running a rubbered down dirt surface, and had a pair of cars on the track side-by-side on Thursday night.
The racing action on Saturday night will feature 4-6 cars with Johnson, Billy Aton, Joel Myers Jr. and Colby Johnson piloting cars.
They’ll have a split field with heat races and a pole shuffle to give those in attendance an idea about what happens at a normal sprint car race, with a goal of attracting some potential investors.
“It definitely gets a lot of attention,” Johnson said. “It’s great for our partners and sponsors for the all the attention that it’s getting, but yeah, we love stirring up some stuff too. Hopefully we can serve some stuff up and get enough people excited to possibly build their track here.”
The event is not scheduled to be streamed live, but Cali Dirt Video will be on-site with coverage of the action. Fans can follow them @CaliDirtVideos on Twitter and also at this link for their YouTube channel.
