State Series ready to open 14-date crusade, beginning at Whynot

by Bryan Wimberley
Mississippi State Championship Challenge Series' correspondent

MERIDIAN, Miss. (March 26) - The countdown clock is almost at zero for the start of the Mississippi State Championship Challenge Series' racing year and for the 14th season, the Meridian-based series have (14) touring dates, from the last weekend in March to the first weekend of October. Race director Charles Thrash has put together an event calendar that visits most parts of the Magnolia State and crosses the border for the first time in four seasons.

To start things off, the dirt late model series makes its 29th appearance at Rodney Wing's Whynot Motorsports Park on March 29th -the first of three stops in '14. Two weeks later, the MSCCS rolls into Columbus Speedway on Saturday, April 12th, known as "The Baddest Bullring in the South", before heading to the bayous of Louisiana for the first time in nearly eight years. The inaugural visit to the 3/8-mile track of St. Tammany Raceway (formerly A-1 Raceway) in Lacombe, La., in late April, is the State Series third ever visit to the Sportman's Paradise. It marks since July 2010 that MSCCS has crossed into another state for an event, when David Breazeale took the checkered flags at Southern Raceway in Milton, Florida.

Next up will be back-to-back visits to the high-banked gumbo of Greenville Speedway, one coming during Memorial Day weekend and the other in early June.
With things heating up on the schedule and on the track, the series will repeat the Whynot-Columbus-St. Tammany-Greenville cycle during the summer months, before making its first of two stops at Jackson Motor Speedway in mid-August, in the Doyle Lott Memorial race.

Action returns to the fast-paced, 3/8-mile, Columbus Speedway on August 23rd, before the series' heads to the popular growing annual All-American 50 at Jackson Motor Speedway on September 13th, for $5,000-to-win. The Mississippi State Championship Challenge Series sanctioned the event in its third year of existence last season, which has had an average car count of 33 entires at Don Cliburn's track, located south of the capital city. Two-time MSCCS champion, Chris Wall, has owned the event the last two seasons, winning back-to-back, before Rodney Wing stole the show the first year.

The series' finale wraps up at one of the deep south's favorite events, in the 8th Annual Gumbo Nationals at James Clolinger and Wesley Washington's Greenville Speedway. The MSCC Series has gained sanction of this race for the third year in-a-row for 2014, seeing Bub McCool of Vicksburg, Miss., visiting Victory Lane in the first two and collecting a matched event-high, $7,500 payday last s