Best Race of the Season, Runner Up: BAD COMPANY vs. RECKONING
Fans of the demolition derby, and particularly the team demolition derby, like action. They like fast cars, hard hits and fire. And beer. But mostly they like fast cars and hard hits. First Night’s race between Bad Company and Reckoning delivered this in spades.
While numerous races feature fast cars, numerous others feature hard hits and a handful combine the two into a fan friendly match of speed and power, the Bad Company/Reckoning took this up a few levels, creating an ultimate derbygasm for those packing the stands.
When the First Night match-up was revealed, I was excited to see it. Bad Company likes to hit and Reckoning takes pride in squaring up with its opponents. When the green flag dropped, the car-nage was on. And the damage was all delivered by Bad Company. Monster hit after monster hit after monster hit.
It started in the first lap when Bad Company’s Jason Ritacco destroyed Reckoning’s Steve Gursky Jr. between turns 3 and 4. It continued five seconds later when Bad Company’s Kyle Shearer annihilated Reckoning’s Brian Anderson on the front straight away, hitting him with such force and abandoned that Shearer left his front bumper implanted in Anderson’s car, like a reverse, modern day Excalibur. Shearer then delivered the last hit of the race, crashing into Reckoning’s “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht just after Vollbrecht crossed the finished line.
The irony of the whole situation was, of course, that despite taking out three of Reckoning’s cars, Bad Company lost the race. Ritacco’s one regret this year was the fact that they took out Reckoning’s two runners too early during the race. In doing so during the first lap of the race, Bad Company allowed Reckoning’s crusher, Vollbrecht, to begin collecting laps with a completely clean and undamaged car.
The ferocity of this race got me on the Bad Company bandwagon and made me fall in love with Shearer. There may have been harder individual hits this year, but there wasn’t a race that featured more collective destruction that this one.