There is nothing tougher than waking up at five in the morning in the dead of winter, knowing that it’s going to be a cold, gray day all day long. Wrapped up in warm blankets, your body begging with you to stay in bed for even just another hour, it takes something special for you to drag your sorry hide from out under the covers to come to a race track, to spend the day putting “Buy Here, Pay Here” refugees through their paces. Which is why I appreciate the King Of The Heap series at NCM Motorsports Park so much…there is no questioning anybody’s fortitude when it’s nineteen degrees out and every breath hangs like a vape cloud in the air. There certainly was no questioning mine, because I brought the Cadillac limo out on it’s first official public viewing, the remnants of a mild snow still frozen to it’s gigantic haunches. Fun fact: the heater in this particular beater does NOT work. There was frost on my buttcheeks by the time I pulled into the track. But it was worth it as team members from all over the paddock turned to look at the thumping beast as it creeped to it’s parking spot.

King of the Heap’s four diciplines (1/8th mile drag, three laps of the NCM “East Course”, an autocross, and everybody’s favorite, rallycross) weren’t changed up too much from the past two events. Other than putting an additional car out on track per session on the road course and trimming back the autocross to give more time to the rallycross, the day would be sorted out pretty much the same as before. A few changes had to be made after the January meet: neck braces were required for the road course section, a response to the Dang, Bros. Camaro going ass-end first into the pit wall, and off-track excursions were going to be treated to harsher penalties. Apparently having the small section of grass near the East Course’s Turn One looking like a freshly plowed field didn’t go over too well. And, finally, there were the famous last words from head ringleader Matt Busby himself involving how he didn’t want mud on his racing surface. With those words ringing in ears, it was time for racers to head out to their pre-staged cars to get going.

The 1/8th mile actually seemed like a lonely place this round, because everybody and their mother was concerned about getting every driver their road-course laps. It’s a valid concern…at KOTH #1, I got laps for the Camaro, but wasn’t able to get my laps in as the sub driver for the Team Long Johnson Ford Crown Victoria. That’s not to say that teams ignored the straightaway blast, but there wasn’t much of a standing line compared to the road course, either. Drama usually is minimal at the 1/8th mile, but I was taking photos when a silver Dodge Neon’s shifter played up and got either second or third gear to sound like a whole lot of metallic hell. Luckily, the incident didn’t kill the transaxle and they continued on. While we are on the subject of odd noises, Team Prestige WorldWide’s Malibu Maxx had arrived making new noises of it’s own, courtesy of a very questionable musical horn tucked up underneath the Maxx’s unusual arse. I was told that it was supposed to be playing “La Cucaracha”, but the noises the horns made had onlookers wondering just how in the world a musical car horn could have an extra chromosome…it was like listening to a five-year old play with a recorder for the first time!

With the low temperatures that had been lower for a week prior, the East Course was going to be just as slick as it was in January. And with Busby’s sermon about Turn One (pictured) ringing clear…especially his “three strikes, your team is off the race course!” line…you would think that drivers would’ve calmed down just a bit. Nope. You can see the Fatillac, fresh from it’s VATS-ectomy, putting the Uniroyal Tiger Paws through the ringer with the enthusiasm of a fleeing felon at the corner, and the big gold Eldorado is driven by a team of legit drivers. Team Hold My Beer, whose members hail from Florida, couldn’t keep their Hyundai Tiburon out of the dirt and would up booted off of the road course. The green Camaro convertible that wears the remains of the dead Z28 I piloted with pride looped it hard and there were a couple of new teams whose cars simply refused to turn right.

To make up for their untimely ejection, Team Hold My Beer went for broke on the Autocross course, with the peppy little Hyundai hiking it’s rear tire like a dog needing to take a desperate whizz along the way. And it wasn’t the only car doing that trick, either…of all the front drivers I’ve ever seen hang a rear tire, an early 2000s Ford Taurus, complete with the most magnificent hater pipe I’ve ever seen (through the trunk to a diesel stack on top of the trunk lid!), put the rear in the air. Team Long Johnson’s Crown Vic, normally a durable and reliable beast, started to have stalling issues under hard cornering, and other than one machine taking out all four pointer cones in what I could only assume was frustration, there was little else to report except the lingering smell of brakes, the ever-growing rod tapping from Team Cold Lotion’s champion Ford Probe, and the shivering of the corner workers.Now, if it seems like I’ve been a bit skimpy on the coverage of the other events, it’s because the rallycross is going to be one of the most infamous events that’s happened at NCM Motorsports Park yet. Kentucky is in winter. We just got a small snowpack melted away, had a quick one-inch dusting a few days prior to the event melt away, and temperatures have not been conducive for large-scale land drying or freezing. There was no doubt that the course was going to be muddy, but the question really was, “how muddy?” Nobody knew for sure. I did a course-walk before the autocross to check for conditions and at best, the main course looked like thawing permafrost…kind of muddy, but not slop. Would it hold up to the traffic? Nope. By the time the last lap was ran the whole rallycross course looked like one long, continuous streak of chocolate pudding marked by cones and the pit paddock’s asphalt was absolutely coated, with a perfect stripe of mud coming from the track to the parking paddock:

One racer had this opinion: “It looks like Clifford the Big Red Dog decided to drag his ass right here, doesn’t it?” It did, and the paddock looked worse, with team members removing mud from fenderwells in-between laps. Racers were having a blast. The starting line guy, not so much…last time I saw him he was holding a parasol like Wile E. Coyote in a vain attempt to not get frosted with mud. And as for Busby, the last time I saw him he had the thousand-yard stare of a war vet who has seen things, probably as he was trying to figure out how the mess was going to get cleaned up. Good thing that Kentucky is the bourbon capital of the world…I think he’s having a glass or twenty-seven tonight.

Thus ends King of the Heap #3. The final round for the 2017-18 season will be held the first Saturday in March and there is no opting in this late…there is already a long list of teams ready to go! We’ll see you next month…maybe the mud will have washed away by then!

Click on a photo below to see more action from King of the Heap #3!