Yellow Pages
ALGER — Coming into this weekend, Mount Vernon’s Jason Solwold had racked up 46 victories at Skagit Speedway.
His 47th was a big one.
Solwold, a former regular at Skagit and with the World of Outlaws, held off a field filled with some of the best sprint car drivers in the country for a main event win on the first night of the two-night World of Outlaws event.
Solwold has spent the year racing both at Skagit and the Alberta Sprint Tour Series. He suffered a back injury during the preliminary night of Dirt Cup.
Solwold led Saturday’s A Main wire-to-wire, frequently plunging into lapped traffic and holding off a challenge from Kerry Madsen.
He also avoided a crash in front of him to maintain his lead.
“Lapped traffic was kind of a headache, but we made it through it,” he said. “It’s better to be lucky than good sometimes, and we had some luck tonight.”
Solwold competed on the World of Outlaws tour from 2005-07. He finished 10th in the standings in ’07, a run that included 17 top-five finishes.
Jason Meyers, Roger Crockett and Jonathan Allard rounded out the top five Saturday.
The two-day event had originally been scheduled for Friday and Saturday, but rain postponed the first night of racing. The finale is today with racing beginning at 7 p.m.
The A Main saw a casualty before it even started when a pair of drivers, defending event champion Craig Dollansky and Nick Engberg, were involved in a collision as the cars were taking the Outlaws’ traditional four-abreast lap. Dollansky returned, but Engberg didn’t, allowing the first alternate — Ferndale’s Brock Lemley — to come into the race.
Former Skagit standout Chad Hillier, whose night got off to an uninspired start with an eighth-place finish in his heat race, held off the B Main field to win that race and join three other drivers who earned spots in the A Main. Hillier, from Burlington, finished the evening in an end-over-end accident in lap 20 of the A Main.
Chad Kemenah led wire-to-wire for a win in the 8-lap C Main to grab the first of two transfer spots to the B Main. Colton Heath, who is having a strong season in the 410 division in Skagit, nabbed the second spot.
The heat race winners included Kerry Madsen, Kraig Kinser, Roger Crockett and two-time Dirt cup champion Allard.
Allard beat out Paul McMahan and Eric Fisher to win the third heat race, which also included Outlaws points leader Donny Schatz, who was fifth.
Madsen also won the dash.
Two local stalwarts got tangled up with an Outlaws legend early when Hillier, Lemley and Steve Kinser were involved in a collision in the first heat race.
Kinser is a 20-time World of Outlaws championship winner.
• Trevor Pyle can be reached at 360-416-2156 or by e-mail at
