9th Annual Fall Nationals (15 Pictures)

Ok everyone, as promised from this thread, http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=109847, here are a few of my favorite pictures from the 9th Annual Fall Nationals from Southern New Mexico Speedway in Las Cruces, NM. I flew out for the 3-day, $10,000 to win with $70,000+ in total purses, show. Over 80 modifieds made the trip with over 125 vehicles actually participating.

I want to thank everyone that chimed in with their advice as this was a new challenge to me as I had never shot daytime racing before. These are going to go from the first to the last day and will vary from night time flash to daytime and back to night time shots. Any and all C/C is appreciated in advance as I plan on making this a semi annual trip.

I'm not really not one for story telling but will a few of the pictures I will try and explain the shots.

R.C. Whitwell


Jason Hughes (winner of the $10,000 feature)


Johnny Scott (black and green car) with unknown driver


Jeremy Payne


The man pointing the finger is Ted ? He was the race director for all the modified races. This particular time, the car he is pointing at passed before he got the passing cone and Ted let him know about it. One VERY animated man!!!!


McCurdy Jr. This car was very photogenic.


Unknown driver. This car had 180 degree headers with some sort of muffler that just sounded wicked fast. Did ok and was an alternate for the "A Main" but missed it by a restart during that race.


Driver from Minnesota, Nelson 44, with Jeff Taylor of Jeff Taylor Motorsports on the outside. Nelson is a big time fellow from his area and Jeff Taylor is known nationwide in the modified division as a premier driver. He started in the back of the 24 car field and worked his way to the front on the outside actually challenging for the lead before his motor began to let go. He was doing great until he got ran off of the back stretch and finished 6th, one spot out of the qualifying position.


Jason Hughes and Jeff Taylor battling it out in the final laps of the main for the night. You can clearly see Jeff's motor smoking right before it was about to let go. BTW the motor ended up making it through the whole race.


Bumper Jones. This is the beginning of the last day when I actually began to understand how the CP worked.


O'Neil. Unknown driver with an AWESOME wrap on his car.


McCurdy Jr. with unknown driver.


Just a shot with 4 cars in the frame. I was using a 70-200 on the first two days and realized that it wasn't wide enough. I ended up using a 24-105 on the final daytime shots and gots some awsome shots with it.


Tommy Weider. He finished 2nd and is an employee of Jason Hughes of Hughes Chassis. As they raced I wondered if the student would "dump" the teacher for $10,000. As it turned out Tommy never really got a chance to get close to Jason except on the restarts and Jason would pull out to a 2-3 car lenght advantage coming out of four to the start finish line.


The only way this last picture is racing related is they popped off a couple thousand dollars of fireworks after the race. The best part about this picture is it was hand held which is totally against the norm from everything that I have read on Dgrin.


All of my pictures can be seen in this gallery.

9th Annual Fall Nationals