WCSS will continue under different name

All the talk of the International Motor Contest Association West Coast Super Stocks going away has the drivers who have not sold their cars up in arms and asking a lot of questions.

Last week Chris Kearns, who owns the name West Coast Super Stocks, said that at the end of the current racing season the WCSS will cease to be due to low racing counts.

Does this mean the racing stops for the class because of the change of the name? Absolutely not said Kirk McCosh, organizer of the new class. McCosh said he was in on the ground floor when the class went from East West Series to WCSS. At the time when Sandy Simpkins was running the class he was asked to take over the class, but was too busy at the time.

He said the class will just cease being WCSS and will not be sanctioned by the IMCA anymore.

“I just do this because we know a lot of the guys and it is a good class of cars. The class has been around forever. Chris Kearns (race promoter who owns name West Coast Super Stocks) would tell you he started this class. I was the one that turned the class over to him from Sandy Simpkins’ East-West Series. She started the series because of the low car counts at Santa Maria and Bakersfield. The drivers put in money into the series. This went on for a couple of years and it worked,” McCosh explained.

Now that Kearns has washed his hands of the class it seems McCosh has a lot of WCSS racers coming to him looking for help.

“All the guys have been coming to me to get it organized and head it in another direction. It’s no secret the class is hurting for car counts. Something happened this weekend and we got some big car counts out at the tracks. Pahrump had 12 cars, there were 14 in Paris, 11 in Santa Maria, and somewhere in the teens in Marysville. I think everyone got pissed off and took their cars to the tracks,” McCosh said.

McCosh believes most of the concern is in Bakersfield and Santa Maria. He said the class is made up of working class people and they all have families or most of them do. According to McCosh, most of the racers don’t have the budget to travel far.

McCosh believes that Kearns was under the impression that if he got them under the IMCA moniker and under the same rules that the cars would flock to Nevada and California to race.

“He seemed to think that since IMCA was this big organization, that it was going to mean something to the drivers and that it would create a group of traveling cars, but it didn’t. Everyone knew it was not going to but Chris,” McCosh said.

McCosh does not know what Bakersfield will do next year, but he does plan on talking to that track soon.

“I know the promoter at Santa Maria and he said, ‘Do whatever you want to do, just bring me the cars back.’ And It doesn’t look like the race car drivers out in Pahrump want to cancel the class too,” he said. “Some 12 showed up last weekend and they just announced they will have a $500 purse for the Sam Stringer race. I can’t pull any cars out of the sky and create a car count. I have been talking with the guys and explaining what I am going to do with the schedule.”

Next year McCosh explained that the California drivers will race with an incentive program and it will be a common championship between Bakersfield and Santa Maria. Each driver will pay into a pot for that incentive, which is how the East-West Series was run.

McCosh said he would like the East-West rivalry to return to Bakersfield and Santa Maria and then he would like the same to happen in Nevada with a North-South kind of a rivalry happening with Tonopah and Pahrump. He then said it would be nice then to have a regional championship, which could include Nevada.

Chad Broadhead of the Pahrump Valley Speedway had this to say about Nevada Super Stock racers.

“My feelings are this, the class is not going anywhere,” he told the PVT. “It is the name of the class that is dying. The IMCA sanction will be leaving. A lot of people think that the class is going away and that is not the case. I don’t care if we call it Super Stock Late Models or Super Stocks. We will probably change the rules up a little bit because they are not our rules. We will still keep the class for these guys to drive in. Having a regional in California, I am not sure I can be interested in that personally. As far as I am concerned, the biggest car counts have come from Pahrump and the champion came from Pahrump. I figured I should have the ticket on anything in this class. We are always second fiddle, I guess that is the way they want to play it because we are a tiny mom and pops track. The car count does not come from Santa Maria or Bakersfield it comes from Pahrump. The biggest car count, the most cars, the most drivers, the most licensed drivers, come from right here in Pahrump.”

Broadhead has already opened up the class by not requiring an IMCA license to race in Pahrump, despite getting complaints from IMCA. Normally those drivers would not even be allowed to race because they have to purchase and IMCA license to drive. He said six drivers were allowed to race last weekend without the license.

“I am at the point that I want car count. Car counts bring the fans to the track. I am not getting the support from the IMCA. We have to do it on our own,” he said.

According to Broadhead, Tonopah will follow suit and do what Pahrump is doing. The drivers don’t care if IMCA pulls out for that only costs more money for them and Broadhead.