Spring is almost here, and with it, comes the perennial Dixie Champ Tour at the South Georgia Motorsports Park. While temperatures are rapidly on the rise, so is the chance of rain for this weekend, with the forecast calling for a strong chance of rain on both Saturday and (a little less so) on Sunday. Bring your wet setups; they may be in need...
With 290 registered, the turnout looks as strong as ever. CS takes over from STX as the largest class at Dixie this year, with 26 entrants. Amidst a bevy of competitive cars, and with last year's winner Nick Amick sitting out, Jason Stroud has his work cut out for him to try and take the top step this year. While the FR-S/BRZ twins make up the bulk of the class (as with STX), there are a handful of very competitive RX-8s, MX-5s, and a couple 350Zs all hoping to take the win this year. STX trails just behind in head count, with 24 entrants. After a stunning victory last year, Randall Prince is throwing it all in his own BMW 328is, in one last ditch effort to establish (or disprove) the car's competitiveness. He has his work cut out for him, as the current defending STX National Champion David Marcus is back in his BRZ, hoping to extend his winning streak. ES, at 24 entrants, is Miata vs Spyder, with Eric Peterson hoping once again to prove that lightness matters. The newcomer to the class is the Mazdaspeed Miata, which, while historically hampered by gearing, may prove to be the class upset with significantly more power and weight than the rest of the class. Ditching the R-comps for street tires for this event, Sam Strano will be mixing it up in AS, looking to see if he can once again take top PAX overall at SGMP.
Moving on to the race tire classes, CSP will remain a hotly contested class, with the multiple time national championship winning Datsun of Bill and Elliot Harvey competing against a field of Miatas and one MR-2 Spyder. Darryl Engle and John Waight have always been exceptionally close, so time will tell who finishes on top this year. In CP, fresh off an oh-so-close second place at Nationals, Robert Lewis will look to extend his Dixie Tour winning streak, but he'll have to fend off his codriver (and Nationals third place finisher, in the same car) Tommy Pulliam in the process. Tim White will be fending off the rest of the SM field once again, but will face stiff competition with the return of Eric Hyman's Godzilla and White's own codriver, Matthew Glagola, who won SSM at Dixie and was a scant 6 hundreths of a second away from a third national championship. SMF has been the Jinx Jordan show for the past several years, but with Christopher Jennings not in the class this year, Cody Johnson will be working on moving up the pecking order into the podium places.
