Ronnie “The King” Davis smoked the competition at his own race May 20, at South Georgia Motorsports Park. In a rematch of the first APMA final at Huntsville, AL, earlier this year, the Suwanee, GA-based racer/promoter reversed the decision on rival Joe Baker.
Words and Photos by Ian Tocher
5/23/06
Series promoter Ronnie Davis won the CSR Performance Products Automatic Pro Mod Association (APMA) race May 20, at South Georgia Motorsports Park, near Valdosta, GA. Davis drove his TracStar-backed ’63 Corvette to the final-round win over Joe Baker and his 2002 Neon.
“It went straight down the track, no problem at all,” Davis said. And despite temperatures hovering in the low 90s all day and surface temps up to 128 degrees, “the track was awesome,” he added, “I didn’t see one thing wrong with the track all day.”
Three rounds of qualifying were planned for the one-day show, but with the first session pushed back to 5 p.m. because of the heat, the final qualifying round was scrapped in favor of starting eliminations. That hurt a couple of racers who were still getting their tune-ups together as the day wore on, including Stephan Stringer, who discovered a faulty tire gauge was reading about 2.5 pounds high.
On the advice of car builder Garret Livingston, Stephan Stringer found and used another tire gauge and discovered the rear slicks on his ’68 Camaro were overinflated by more than two pounds. With the faulty gauge revealed and tire pressures lowered, Stringer said he immediately felt an improvement in the car’s launch, but it came just a little too late to benefit him in the race.
“We’d been fighting a little problem with the car with too much wheel speed out of the gate and it took all the way up to today to find it,” the Somerset, KY-based racer said after falling to Baker in the race opener. “We found it in the second qualifying round, but didn’t get down the track. Then we didn’t get to run that third round and even though we had a lot more to throw to it, we were scared to try because we wanted to make sure we made a race out of it.”