Monthly Archives: February 2020

The Gateway Dirt Nationals

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The sport I love and grew up around has been growing and experimenting to make it better and more appealing to other people. One unique way it has made a stride in going forward would be the event, “The Gateway Dirt Nationals”. A man by the name of Cody Sommer had a dream that many thought was impossible and completely wack. He wanted to have an indoor Late Model and Modified race in December.

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Cody Sommer

On December 15th though the 17th of 2016 the inaugural Gateway Dirt Nationals was born. The event took place in the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri and drew in massive car counts and a huge crowd. The event was even broadcast live on dirtondirt.com so thousands more tuned in.

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View of the track

Beings the race took place in a football stadium it was extremely small: just a 1/5 mile. To put that into prospective, Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, TN hosted a college football game in their infield and the track is only a 1/2 mile. Now due to the small size of the track there was a lot of wrecking going on which frustrated many drivers and fans. Despite all the wrecking and the track being quite choppy the Feature events were action packed and provided some great door to door racing. The event has now been run four years in a row adding the Midget class in 2018. They already have dates out for the 5th annual running of the event this coming December.

2019 event pump up video

“The Dirt Doctor” Lorin Johnson

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Lorin Johnson is another wheel man to be considered one of the greatest to drive a race car in the northern part of the country. The Miller, SD native has been racing since 1982 or 1983 (I know its one of these two years) and has been virtually unbeatable to this day. In 1983 he won his first track championships at Dakota State Fair Speedway in Huron, SD and at Miller Speedway in Miller, SD. He now has too many track championships to keep track of to go along with a Wissota Modified national championship. Over his 36 year career he has accumulated over 330 feature wins as well. Lorin is also a guy who has time to lend a bit of advise to anyone new to the sport or anyone who’s been doing it for a while.

“Showtime” Kent Arment

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Kent Arment is arguably the greatest of all time when it comes to dirt track racing in the northern part of the country. Kent is a second generation driver out of Aberdeen, SD and has piloted his Wissota Modified and Late Model to over 600 wins, 5 national championships and 60 plus track championships so you can about imagine why he’s nicknamed “showtime”. All of those accolades and he is still adding to them. Kent is also one of the most helpful and nicest guys at the racetrack always willing to help and offer advise to the other drivers.

Duane Zabel

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The first driver I am writing about is none other than my old man, Duane Zabel. Duane started his racing career in the summer of 1994 in the Street stock division and picked up 2 wins. The following year he moved up into a Wissota Super Stock and raced them until 2003. He had the most success of his career in the super stock, winning the South Dakota Governors Cup and numerous other feature wins. Duane is currently 3rd on the all time super stock wins list for Brown County Speedway picking up 22 wins in 8 seasons at the track. In 2004 he moved up to the Wissota modified class where he stayed until his retirement in 2017. He had early success in the modified picking up a 4th place finish in the Wissota Western 100 as a rookie and had a few feature wins up to 2005 when he hit a 11 year win drought and ended it by picking up arguably the biggest win of his career, the inaugural Bullet Sportswear Double Down Nationals in 2016. He now is retired and is the team owner/crew chief of Zabel Bros Motorsports.

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