Red Light Racing League driver Kenny Allen opened his YesterYear Racing™ League Tour Modified account Tuesday night by winning the enigma known as The Icebreaker 250 Presented by VctryLnSprts. In what turned out to be a one caution affair at the 100-lap Daytona International Speedway race, drivers struggle to try and find an answer to make the Tour Modified cars work in the draft. Early on, bump-drafting was king and it was happening in packs all over the track. But as drivers began to mysteriously lose the draft and lose touch with their running groups, they began to look elsewhere to solve the puzzle. Some suspected there was a precise "bubble draft" and if you inched outside of the "bubble," you would lose momentum. Others postulated that oil temperature was the culprit and that the temperature needed to be in a specific range for the car to work optimally. At one point in the race driver Todd Liston was able to single-handedly run down a group of three cars ahead of him without drafting help from anyone. Liston, who finished third in the race, stated in the post race interview that he felt like it was all about keeping the cars as steady and smooth as possible. "You needed to be smooth and steady and turn the wheel slightly and only when necessary. There was also a racing line that minimized the bottoming out of the car. If I ran that line smoothly, I was successful in turning a quick lap most of the time," Liston said.
In the waning laps of the race, it looked as though Elliot Sadler eSports driver Jerry Isaac's, who had led the most laps in the race, was going to cruise to victory. ToyMaker Racing driver Kenny Allen lost him in lapped traffic going into turn one of the last lap. Then suddenly Allen's car seemed to get a Nitrous Oxide System (NOS) boost coming out of turn 4 and he was able to run down Isaac's at the finish line to cross six one-hundredths of a second clear of Isaac's. "It was amazing," said Allen in his post race interview. "I was already congratulating Jerry going down the back stretch and then coming out of turn 4 my car just came alive."
The post-race chatter among all the drivers was that the race was indeed a puzzle. And a puzzle that remains a mystery for most of the drivers.
The YesterYear Racing™ circus has a month off before heading to the South Boston Speedway in South Boston, Virginia for the 150-lap SoBo 150 on Tuesday, March 25, 2025.
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