News Director 
Column By: RANDY KANE / RPW – HAMBURG, PA – There are not that many challenges left in weekly Sportsman racing for Craig Whitmoyer.
Looking at the 2017 racing season, though, the 41-year-old veteran race team owner and driver has found one.
The Hamburg resident already is a four-time Sportsman track champion (2002, 2003, 2007 and 2010) running weekly at Big Diamond Speedway in Forestville and, in addition, Whitmoyer has topped the Thunder on The Hill Sportsman mini-series championship back in 2010 at Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville. Whitmoyer’s been campaigning weekly, now, the past four seasons at the Berks County based third-mile high-banked track and in 2015 he finished solidly as the runner-up in the season-long standings. Last season, he finished third in the points race. That’s put Whitmoyer up to the challenge of winning the Grandview weekly Sportsman track championship for 2017.
“I don’t really want to talk about the championship,” suggested Whitmoyer. “I was in the hunt right to the end, last year, until I got caught up in a couple of late season Talladega-styled wrecks that took me right out of that race. I don’t want to hear any talk about championships until, maybe, September. I just plan to go out there each Saturday night, give it 110% and we’ll give it our best. We’ll take what we get each week and try to come back running better the next weekend. We’re just going to race and have fun.”
Whitmoyer’s been racing, now, for roughly two-dozen seasons, after starting out at Big Diamond steering a Roadrunner ride, which he built at home as a teenager. His family knew more about 358 Modified racers and a lot about Sportsman cars, so, the following year they went to work building a Sportsman ride and went racing.
“I’ve been involved with a Sportsman car long enough, now, and it’s time to move up,” revealed Whitmoyer. “I’ve been thinking of moving into a 358 Modified for about three years, now, but just haven’t put everything together. I’ve got a small crew. I don’t have any big dollar backers. I have no real crew chief or all the extra parts and all the goodies those bigger teams have. I’ve got a limited budget and they put on new tires each week and it’s tough being a little guy. You get torn up one week, you fall behind and it’s very hard to get caught up again.
“It’s a lot of work. I’ve got bills to pay like everyone else, running a Sportsman car. I help out my brother (Brandon) who’s racing his own Sportsman at Grandview, plus I do all the weekly maintenance stuff on Daryl Dissinger’s Sportsman he races weekly at Big Diamond. Getting my car ready for Grandview is tough enough. If I do run a 358 Modified I won’t do it unless it’s done right. I tried doing it several years ago and bit off more than I could chew, forcing us to return to a Sportsman. I could build a good 358 Modified car, but I want to do things right or not bother,” explained Whitmoyer, who works full-time during the week as an operations manager at Green Acres Outdoor Living in Whitehall.
Whitmoyer has six career Sportsman victories at Grandview, plus he has the all-time career high of 26 triumphs in a Sportsman at Big Diamond. At the end of 2016, Whitmoyer won a bunch of big-paying Sportsman specials at places like Bridgeport Speedway in New Jersey and Five Mile Point Speedway in New York and hopes to do a little traveling again in 2017.
“I love running Bridgeport and I’ll run the Poker Series events there in 2017, plus I’ll run a handful of races with my 358 Modified car at Big Diamond with no real schedule right now,” Whitmoyer offered. “We got the Sportsman car going pretty darn good at the end of last season after struggling a lot throughout the year. I have plenty of power through Leindecker Racing Engines in Center Valley under the hood and I’ll just race that same car again in 2017. It’s the same car we raced in 2016, I didn’t even put a new body on it. We’ll start off the year at Bridgeport the week of the Grandview practice and begin at Grandview on opening night, April first.”
A Grandview Sportsman championship in 2017, certainly, would be a nice feather in his cap, with that challenge still something he’d love to accomplish.
“This year is this year,” announced Whitmoyer, who’ll turn 42 in August. “We’ll do the best we can and do what we can do.”
