Solidifying himself as the early front-runner to win the 2024 YesterYear Racing™ Series, Tom Ogle somehow managed to upstage his round one performance on Tuesday night by winning the Hickory Southern Modified 150, starting on the pole position, and leading every lap of the event. If it weren’t for Lloyd Moore, who finished second, setting fastest lap of the race by one one-hundredth of a second over Ogle’s time, Ogle would have completed a “Grand Slam,” which is incredibly rare in auto racing. Moore was never far behind Ogle and kept it close the entire race. When asked in the post-race interview what Moore could have done to get by Ogle, Moore said “I had no shot at him at all. He would have had to have gotten into the wall or make some other mistake for me to have a shot at him. It was just a deal where I had to follow Tom around and just try not to get too loose to let Bruce catch up.” Bruce Pearson ran a solid race and finished third on the night. Interestingly, “Hubble,” YesterYear Racing’s OpenAI Bot, had predicted a second-place finish for Pearson which turned out to be a great forecast given where he ended up.
Bootleg’s Ryan Pittman ended up grabbing the Hard Charger Award on the night coming from 19th all the way up to 6th. OBRL’s Dale Copeland earned the Goody’s Headache Award. Copeland ran strong early on, but his tires seemed to go away quickly in the last 30-40 laps of the race and had a few close calls that could have easily turned out worse than they did. Copeland eased it home in 8th.
The night was marred by issues primarily caused by a “buggy” large patch update on the iRacing platform earlier in the day. The broadcasters had issues hooking into the race and were forced to troubleshoot on the fly. The Race Director had issues with the race not saving properly once it was concluded. And storms throughout certain parts of the continental U.S. caused various issues for others.
Like round one in Martinsville, the race got off to a rocky start with a good portion of cautions early on. However, the race settled, and the total cautions (5) ended up being one less than the actual Southern Modified 150 that took place on March 31, 1990.
The boys will travel to Richmond International Speedway on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, for the third round of the Series. The Richmond 200 will be the second longest race in the Series and should provide plenty of excitement.
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