Saturday’s Hot Shoe National at Savannah, GA (what was to be the start of Tony’s Daytona racing experience) was cancelled.  Tony planned on skipping the Pro-Am events as he’s trying to save his knee for the Nationals. But since Savannah was cancelled, he decided to head to Daytona for Sunday’s Pro-Am event and try to get a leg up on set-up for the two Grand National events on Wednesday & Thursday. The Daytona short track is very different from any of the track surfaces that Tony is accustomed to riding, so it was a learning experience. He started off a bit slow but made changes to the bike set-up and continued to make progress all day long. Unfortunately, he missed the main event by one spot.

Tony feels that this was a good learning experience and will make him feel more comfortable and at ease as he participates in his first ever Grand National race. For those of you who don’t know a lot about professional Dirt Track racing, there are basically two levels of professional racer (formerly three): Grand National Expert & Grand National Pro. Tony being a first year professional racer is considered a Grand National Pro. This year, they have changed the format of the Grand National racing program to allow Grand National Pros to participate at every Grand National event on single-cylinder equipment (on the bigger tracks, the Grand National Experts will be riding twin-cylinder equipment). Tony is a first year Grand National Pro and because of the change in the format, they have allowed quite a few riders to hang back a year. This means that Tony will be competing against a number of second year Grand National Pros.  As for today, practice and qualifying is complete. Tony is currently waiting for qualifying results to be posted. They will take the top 38 qualifiers from his class into the evening program.

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