Former Slinger champ ready for season

Daily News (West Bend, Wis.)
Published: April 10, 2014

Former Slinger champ ready for season

Reynolds Jr. finished 2013 season strong

By NICHOLAS DETTMANN

Daily News

Just when Jon Reynolds Jr. believed he had hit his groove, the race season was over.

Then came the brutal winter.

“It felt like a winter and a half for me,” Reynolds joked.

To cure the winter blues, Reynolds will be at a place he knows well: Rockford Speedway. He’ll be doing so with confidence.

“I’m looking forward to the season,” Reynolds said. “We ran well late in the year.

“All we did this offseason was improve in a few areas, making parts stronger, but not changing setups so I can go right off the bat this year and pick up where we left off.”

Reynolds and 34 other drivers will get out to the race track and race to finally get the 2014 season going with the 37th annual Spring Classic.

Practice for the event will be Saturday and the 108-lap feature with the Big 8 Series, a Midwest touring series for limited late model cars, will be at 1 p.m. Sunday.

“I’m pretty excited; I can’t wait for Saturday,” Reynolds said. “We’re pretty excited.”

The event will also host the Mid-American Stock Car Series, in which Richfield’s Bill Prietzel and West Bend’s Brad Keith are among those expected to compete, and the Illinois Vintage Car Series. The Big 8 Series field will feature 30 track or series championships among the entrants. Among those expected to compete are Slinger regulars John DeAngelis Jr., Gregg Pawelski, Jeff Holtz, Michael Bilderback, Adam Peschek and Jake Vanoskey.

Also scheduled to compete is Casey Johnson, who finished third at last year’s Slinger Nationals and is the defending series champion.

Reynolds has been hot of late at Rockford.

He won the last Big 8 Series race at the track in September. He has also won three of the last four races at the track in the Big 8 Series and is a twotime Spring Classic winner.

Reynolds has seven career Big 8 Series victories, second on the all-time list behind Jeremy Miller (10). Five of those victories have come at Rockford. The defending race winner is Alex Papini.

“We were just struggling setup wise,” Reynolds said about his early season struggles, adding a new tire compound rule didn’t help the matter. “Some of the things we were doing the year before hurt the new tire. It just took us too long (to make the adjustments).

“The car just wouldn’t turn.”

Once he and his crew figured it out, Reynolds, the only two-time limited late model track champion in Slinger Superspeedway history, got rolling.

This season, Reynolds has high expectations and a busy schedule.

Reynolds plans to run the full schedule at Rockford, which is his home track, and hopes to run a full super late model schedule at Slinger, in addition to the Big 8 Series. Reynolds also said about the Slinger Nationals in July, “there’s no way we’ll miss it.”

This summer, the Big 8 Series will return to Slinger for the first time since 2011, a race won by James Swan, which was his first career late model victory. That event will be July 13, the Sunday before the Slinger Nationals.

Reynolds won the series’ visit to Slinger in 2010.

It’s a special year for the series as it is the 10th season of the Big 8 Series.

“There’s so much to like about it,” Reynolds said about the series. “It’s a lot cheaper than running a super late series. You go to a lot of neat and fast race tracks and I’d say it’s more competitive as far as the depth of the drivers.”

Reynolds believes anywhere from eight to 10 drivers are capable of winning Sunday’s feature.

The Reynolds name has a special place in Big 8 Series history.

Reynolds’ father, Jon Reynolds Sr., won the series’ first feature Sept. 24, 2004, at Rockford.

“You want to carry on that tradition,” Reynolds Jr. said about his dad’s historic feature victory. “That weekend, he won both features Friday and Saturday. That was his last big win.”

Reynolds Jr. won the series’ first championship in 2005.

“It was really exciting to win the championship for the first season,” Reynolds said. “It was only our second season of racing. To travel to those tracks and win the championship was pretty big.”