SENOIA, Ga. (Nov. 12) — When he unloaded for the first time in more than two years Friday at Senoia Raceway, Jimmy Owens couldn’t help but notice the major changes that the Pollard family have undertaken at the Atlanta-area oval since taking back over ownership of the track at the beginning of the year.

“This is nice,” Owens said at Friday’s Peach State Classic opener. “It’s a lot different than I remembered it.”

While Owens admired the difference in upgrades to the Senoia facility, many of those who attended Friday’s $10,000-to-win unsanctioned event noticed another major difference in the pit area: Owens’ chassis brand.

Debuting a new Longhorn Chassis that his Ramirez Motorsports team purchased this week, Owens of Newport, Tenn., started 11th and finished 17th in Friday’s caution-free 25-lap feature. He was one lap down to race-dominator Kyle Bronson of Brandon, Fla., in an event that served as a tuneup for Saturday’s $52,000-to-win Peach State Classic finale.

The inauspicious start in his Longhorn was caused by some new-car gremlins that put Owens and his team behind early in the night.

“We fought brake issues all night long,” Owens said. “It’s a different brake system, and I guess I cooked the brakes out there in the heat race. I didn’t have no brakes, so we were busy all night long trying to get brakes on this thing. Had to pull the hubs off and repack them because they got so dadgum hot. With all that going on, we didn’t have much time to do any adjusting on the car and just wasn’t very good in the feature.”

The surprise switch to Longhorn for Senoia’s big weekend doesn’t mean he’s fully changing his team over to Longhorns from Rocket Chassis, which is the chassis brand he’s competed in for most of the last five seasons and the brand that he drove to his fourth Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship just one year ago.

“I’m not getting any younger, so I figured I’d just give it a whirl and see what we can do,” Owens said in explaining his motivation to add a Longhorn to his fleet. “If it’s good for us, that’s good. If it’s not we’ll keep running what we got. We still have our Rockets and all that stuff.

“Those guys (at Rocket Chassis) have been really, really good to us. Steve Baker and Mark Richards and all of them. I ain’t saying we’re switching cars. We just got one to try and see if we can better ourselves. We were pretty good with what we had, but these cars are pretty good too. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”

Winger takes his shot

In sports such as basketball and football, the term desperation heave is typically used to describe a last-ditched effort to connect on a game-winning shot or touchdown pass usually attempted at the end of the game.

Ashton Winger’s slide job on the start of Friday’s fourth heat race at Senoia may not have come at the end of Friday’s program or directly determined the event’s outcome, but it had the same desperation feel as a buzzer-beating halfcourt shot or a Hail Mary pass in football.

Starting from the inside of the front row after watching the three heat races before his all reward outside-front-row starters with an obvious advantage on the start of each race, Winger gave it all he had on the first lap, throwing his car into turn one with so much momentum that it not only carried him ahead of second-starting Kyle Bronson, but also took him over the cushion in turn two.

“When the racetrack’s that top dominant as it was at the time, I had to try it,” said Winger, the home-track racer from nearby Hampton, Ga. “I didn’t want to park on his nose, so I made sure I’d clear him. I cleared him by a mile, but I pushed. That was pretty much our night right there.”

It was indeed a crucial moment in the night as Bronson easily crossed Winger over to pull ahead down the backstretch and cruised to victory in the 10-lap prelim to earn the outside pole for Friday’s feature. Winger settled for second and the eighth starting spot. Bronson went on to dominate the 25-lap feature, while Winger could only climb to fifth in the caution-free race.

“It’s way easier to win from second than eighth,” said Winger, who entered Friday’s event a perfect five-for-five on winning at Senoia this season. “Starting eighth, I still felt good about it. But I just got held up there. When I got (to fifth) I looked up and I couldn’t even see those guys ahead of me. There was no catching them at that point.”

Although Winger was clearly disappointed to see his impressive Senoia streak come to and end, he was optimistic about his chances for a rebound in Saturday’s finale.

“I think we’re the fastest car here,” Winger said. “Congrats to Bronson. He was really good and should’ve won. But I think we’ll be really good coming back here tomorrow.”

Dohm’s surprise appearance

When Zack Dohm of Cross Lanes, W.Va., made the decision to make the late-season trip down to Georgia to run the Peach State Classic, he did so thinking he would be racing on a slick surface that would be a good fit for his driving style. But when he made his first laps around Senoia’s 3/8-mile oval, Dohm quickly realized that the track’s reputation for having little to no grip, doesn’t always apply early in a race night.

“That was not what I was expecting at all,” Dohm said of Senoia’s hooked-up, high-speed conditions during Friday’s qualifying and heat races. “We came down here with a 1,200-lap motor thinking we’d be alright. Let me tell ya, it was lugging on that thing. It was doing all it could do.”

Fortunately for Dohm, Senoia’s surface slicked off to the type of conditions it’s become known for in recent seasons. Those kind of conditions are much more to Dohm’s liking, and it showed. Without the help of a caution, he climbed 14th to eight in the 25-lapper.

“It wasn’t bad,” Dohm said of his performance. “Twenty-five laps is a really short race, and there’s a bunch of really good guys here. We didn’t get any cautions, and when it’s that slick you can’t just pick ’em off. It takes a few laps to set ’em up and pull it off.

“When it gets slick, I’m confident in myself. I think we can beat anybody when the circumstances are right. When the track’s slick and smooth and you’ve gotta turn left and keep the car underneath ya. That’s what really, really fits me and that’s what it was for the feature. I just wish it would’ve been a little bit more like that earlier in the night.”

With $52,052 up for grabs in Saturday’s finale, Dohm hopes the slower conditions come into play much earlier in the program.

“We learned a lot. There’s a couple things I think we can do to be better tomorrow night if the track’s similar,” Dohm said. “I think we’ll have a shot at it tomorrow, but I’d feel a lot better about it if the track isn’t so hooked up in qualifying. It doesn’t even have to be slick, just not so damn hooked up.”

Ford fades late

Jensen Ford of Johnson City, Tenn., was another first-timer at Senoia surprised by the track’s conditions. However, his experience was the opposite of Dohm’s. Ford started out better on the heavier track surface and faded as the track slicked off.

“When it’s that slick and you get tight, it ain’t good,” Ford said of his 12th-to-16th slide. “I think we know a little more about which way we need to go for that tomorrow so hopefully we’ll be better.”

Ford, the soon-to-be crowned champion on this year’s Valvoline Iron-Man Southern Series, wasn’t prepared for just how slick Senoia became.

“The slickness reminds me of 411, but I don’t think 411 ever gets this slick,” Ford said in comparing Senoia to one of his home tracks Seymour, Tenn.’s 411 Motor Speedway. “That was something else. And it was like a light switch. It went from grip to slick real quick. But it’s a neat track. Puts everybody a lot closer I think and makes things interesting.”