Storylines: Money in the Bank at Berlin Raceway

It’s race day for the Money in the Bank at Berlin Raceway, a $10,000-to-win showdown, sanctioned by the SRL National Tour for the second year in a row.

It’s a pretty deep field with a handful of traveling and NASCAR stars against the weekly show contenders who race for the championship at the Western Michigan bullring. This is the seventh year in a row this event has been held and all but one previous winner is in the field.

The exception is defending winner William Byron, who did not return for a second consecutive attempt, following a recent transition from Donnie Wilson Motorsports to Anthony Campi Racing. With that said, Carson Hocevar is actually seeking his third straight win in this race if you consider that he missed the 2022 running with a broken ankle.

Cup Series star Erik Jones is back for a second straight year and the traveling Super Late Model contingent is made up of Bubba Pollard, Gio Ruggiero, Sean Hingorani and Derek Griffith. This race also tends to favor the locals, who this year is represented by track champions Evan Shotko, Brian Campbell, Nate Walton and Scott Thomas.

Berlin is best described as a funky track, with a layout that features just one straightaway along the frontstretch, with a constant turn the rest of the way around the circuit. It’s challenging and different, the definition driver’s track, to say nothing of being one of the absolute best facilities imaginable.

A couple of top storylines can be found below.

EXPERIENCE MATTERS TO A POINT

Sure, the likes of Carson Hocevar, Brian Campbell and Evan Shotko have a tremendous amount of experience at Berlin and understand the changing lines and generalized tire falloff throughout the race but all three of them say that could hurt them in a longer race too.

Hocevar has won this race twice but says that doesn’t mean anything for Wednesday night.

“From a driver’s standpoint, I’m ahead of the game, but from a setup standpoint, sometimes we’re behind because we know so much,” Hocevar said. “Sometimes it’s better here to have an outsider perspective.

“We’ve been here three weeks in a row, been good, and changed nothing and were almost last. The track changes so much and you default to what you think you know. You think, ‘well that worked the first time so it will here’ and it doesn’t. There will never be a perfect race car here. Never will be, never. The goal here is just to be the best of the worst.”

Campbell echoed that sentiment.

“Drivability of the car,” Campbell said. “Just making sure we’re note racing right now from week-to-week. These guys are coming in fresh with a fresh set of tires, so they have fresh ideas.

“That’s good and bad for us. We have a mindset of where we want to go but these guys have to be more open-minded, they have no pre-conceived notions of what to do, and that could help or hurt.

“You know, you get someone like William Byron come in here last year and they just rocked us out. It was awesome. Then came the 251, and the local Berlin guys handled them. So that could be the case this week, or these guys could come in and beat us up, because they’re not dummies. They’re really good.”

With that said, Shotko, feels good about his experience coming off a win in the Battle at Berlin in August.

“We understand the weather, and tires, and it just comes down to making the right calls during the race,” Shotko said. “And that’s the hard part more than what you unload with.”

ERIK JONES IS FAST

Cup Series contender, and two-time Southern 500 winner, Erik Jones is still learning the modern Super Late Model after spending almost five years away from the discipline before returning last year. He is driving a Port City Phase II chassis out of his own shop and is still learning both the platform and the pace needs to be from track-to-track on the various tire combinations.

But again, the key is that Jones has fast cars and feels confident ahead of Money in the Bank.

“We unloaded somewhat close,” Jones said. “We put some stickers on the car and went a comparable time to the other fast cars. We’re in the ballpark. It’s good. We need more speed. I thought our long run was decent. We’ll see. I thought our Port City car was pretty good. We got some work to do, some things we want to try to get us where we need to be.”

BUBBA IS BACK

After finishing second in practice on Tuesday, Bubba Pollard said he was slow, which has only one meaning if you have followed the career of driver No. 26 over the past decade.

He’s fast.

No seriously, Pollard is such a perfectionist that he has never been satisfied with his car before a race and tends to be maddest at his car when he knows it’s close and could win. It’s almost as if he has a higher expectation when he knows the car is capable of it.

Pollard has won a half dozen races this year, is contending for championships in ASA, SRL and Southern Super Series competition, and is enjoying his best stretch since the spring of 2020.

“I think we’re decent,” Pollard said. “I don’t think we’re that bad but when you come here once or drive a year, you don’t know but it doesn’t drive bad. We got decent speed. We got some things to work on. We shot ourselves in the foot on cold tires, put some new ones on, and had to take everything we put on back off.

“We ran circle here for two hours and messed ourselves up. After we worked that out, I didn’t think we were that bad, made some good changes. This place is so weather sensitive. The track is going to change a bit so we’ll see.

UNDERSTANDING THE TIRES

The biggest talk during all the practice sessions was just teams wrapping their arms around this tire combination — the Hoosier 3035 on the lefts and F-45s on the right.

Hocevar had never run this many laps in practice before.

“I just wanted to understand this tire, never run it before,” Hocevar said. “I just wanted to know what it did over a long run, from my perspective, and what I can do over a long run. The 50 laps at the end is going to be important so we just went out there and did a 50 lap run.

I thought our race car was good enough that we could just burn a set of tires on this set up and just seeing what it would do over that long run.”

That was kind of the mentality for Pollard too.

“These tires, they’re new to me,” Pollard said. “The lefts, this compound, it being split, will be interesting if the sun comes up and lays down both rubbers. As long as we have a good balance, I think we’ll be fine, it’s just going to come down to how much rubber is laid down tomorrow and how black the track gets and how we’ll have to respond to that.”

To that point, Griffith said the track completely changed on Tuesday when the sun briefly peeked out.

“It was crazy,” Griffith said. “It was like 20 minutes, at most, but tomorrow will be a different ball game too. The track hasn’t had a lot of rain this month apparently so it had a lot of grip. I don’t know if that will be the case during the race if it’s going to be hot and sunny.

“That will help us because we have a low power car, and those who have these dry sump motors will be buzzing (the tires) on Lap 10 and we should stay pretty consistent.”

CRATE VERSUS SUPER

What Griffith said at the end is also part of the dynamic as this race will feature both Crate Pro Lates and traditional Super Late Models on an equal playing field. It’s a matter of how much power you can make without burning up your tires.

That point was best articulated by Campbell.

“We kind of made our mindset up this winter that we’re going to bring the Super out and go as deep into the summer as we possiblt can and make a decision only when we think we’re getting beat by it,” Campbell said. “So far, I don’t think we’ve seen a negative effect of running the 25 pounds extra weight.”

BROADCAST

Money in the Bank airs live on FloRacing

POINTS

This race counts towards both the SRL National and Berlin Raceway Super Late Model track championship standings.

ENTRY LIST

• Andrew Scheid
• Evan Shotko
• Austin Hull
• Eric White
• Boris Jurkovic
• Dylan Stovall
• Brian Campbell
• Haden Horvath
• Nate Walton
• Jett Noland
• Billy VanMeter
• Trever McCoy
• Derek Griffith
• Lee Vandyk
• Keith Herp
• Carson Hocevar
• Scott Thomas
• Blake Rowe
• Tyler Roarhig
• Joe Bush
• Kyle Crump
• Bubba Pollard
• Derek Kneeland
• Brian Bergakker
• Erik Jones
• Gio Ruggiero
• Sean Hingorani
• Tony Elrod
• Mike Garvey
• Chase Burda
• Zach Telford
• Wes Griffith

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