Why Cordele Speedfest was rightfully postponed

The weekend has come and gone and the winter storm that impacted the eastern half of the country delivered largely as expected, even if there were some variables that did not manifest entirely as forecast, specifically in the Carolinas.

As a result, the reasons to have postponed the Super Late Model and Pro Late Model races this past weekend at Cordele Motor Speedway were justifiable. Those reasons were the travel logistics for teams coming from Middle Tennessee and the Carolinas.

For two different reasons, those roads were not traversable come Saturday afternoon into the evening hours. The storm did arrive a little later than originally forecast but the likes of Hunter Wright and Dylan Fetcho would have faced impossible travel odds getting back home.

On one hand, by time the storm reached the Carolinas, the mid-level temperatures were cool enough by a couple of degrees to keep the precipitation from remaining sleet instead of turning into ice. If it was a little cooler, it would have been snow.

Keep in mind, a pocket of warmer air from the south that wedges in between the frozen surface layer temperatures and the atmospheric temperatures is what melts the precipitation and determines what it falls as.

In the Carolinas, sleet covered the roads and turned them into slick, slick ice while in Middle Tennessee, freezing rain drooped power lines and trees. Ultimately, the entire region was paralyzed for a couple of days for two different reasons.

Ice accumulation round the .25 range is where power lines and trees start to come down. Sleet, unlike snow, accumulates on the roads first, and that is what makes roads non-traversable.

All told, asking teams from the Carolinas and Tennessee to drive back through that on Saturday night and Sunday morning would be asking a lot from their safety.