Northeast Dirt Mod Hall Special Awards For ’25 To Salerno, Conroy, Cathell, Voorhees & Cella

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Story By: BUFFY SWANSON / NORTHEAST DIRT MODIFIED HALL OF FAME – WEEDSPORT, NY – Being honored at the July 24 Northeast Dirt Modified Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Weedsport, NY are Vinny Salerno, Tommy Conroy, Charlie and Joyce Cathell, Fred Voorhees and Jane Cella.

The 2025 Gene DeWitt Car Owner Award goes to Vinny Salerno, now of Hellertown, PA, whose signature 4* car has carried some of the biggest names in the business to many of their greatest victories. In the late 1980s, Salerno started helping a friend at Orange County Fair Speedway in Middletown, NY—and it all escalated from there. He got hooked up with Bobby Hayes Jr., taking Orange County’s 1996 358 title before moving to Modified and winning in that class, too. After a brief winless stint with asphalt ace Earl Paules Jr., Salerno got serious: Andy Bachetti became the first of Vinny’s “heavy hitters,” winning back-to-back 358 championships at Orange County in 2000 and 2001. Looking to cut back, he fielded a single car for Jerry Higbie for two years. That is, until Brett Hearn came calling in 2004. For the next six seasons, Hearn won everything there was to win in Salerno’s small-block—a dozen DIRTcar 358 Series races, three Eastern States SB wins, the 2007 358 event on the Syracuse mile, Hagerstown’s Octoberfest, Five Mile Point’s Southern Tier 100, the 2006 Mr. DIRTcar 358 Series championship, a trio of titles at Albany-Saratoga, one at Lebanon Valley and another at Middletown. When Hearn and Salerno split in 2009, Tim McCreadie got the job done—against all odds, grabbing a big Brewerton victory less than a month after Salerno’s entire race operation was stolen in Canada. Tucking appearances for the 4* team into his full Late Model schedule, Timmy won 14 majors for Vinny, including Utica-Rome’s New Yorker 200, the 2010 Eastern States 200 and Hagerstown Octoberfest, the 2012 SDW 358 race, a $20K 100 at New Egypt, and three in a row at Charlotte. From 2013-14, Jeff Strunk added a Big Diamond Coalcracker, Grandview’s Freedom 76, 11 total wins and a Grandview championship. Michael Storms and Kevin Root also contributed victories. Since teaming with Anthony Perrego in 2022, Salerno’s secured two SDS events, a Charlotte World Final and three other five-figure scores.

The recipient of this year’s Mechanic/Engineering Award, Tommy Conroy of Esperance, NY, has had a wrench in his hand since he was 12 years old. That’s when he began apprenticing at fabricator Dick Hicks’ shop, helping Dick and his Fonda and Albany-Saratoga customers. It was through Hicks that Conroy connected with the Jody Gable team—and superstar Brett Hearn—when he was still a kid. He moved to New Jersey and went to work full-time for Hearn once he graduated high school in 2005. With Brett’s encouragement, Conroy spent a year at the NASCAR Technical Institute in North Carolina, bouncing back and forth for big races and also working in Ken Schrader’s shop. It was all a top-flight professional deal at the highest level—and the results showed. During the eight seasons he crewed for Hearn, they bagged all the biggies: big-block and small-block events at the Syracuse mile, three BB 200s and five SB races at Eastern States, a pair of 200s at Lebanon Valley, Fulton’s Outlaw 200, a Rolling Wheels 200, four at Hagerstown’s Octoberfest, 20 SDS wins, nine track championships, two Florida tour titles, the Mr. DIRTcar 358 Series in 2006, and two Mr. DIRTcar Modified Series crowns, in 2007 and ’09. Needing a change, Conroy moved back home to New York in 2013, working again for Dick Hicks and various Fonda and Albany runners for the next four years, until Stewart Friesen recruited him for his Modified effort. Together since 2017, filling in races around Friesen’s NASCAR Truck calendar, the team has dominated many of the “crown jewel” events on the circuit—Super DIRT Week big-block and 358 classics at Oswego, three BB 200s and two 358 100s at Eastern States, a pair of Fonda 200s, a $50,000 payday at Port Royal, and a 2021 sweep of the Modified card at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Charlie and Joyce Cathell, the former promotional team at the Delaware International Speedway complex, will receive the prestigious Leonard J. Sammons Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to Auto Racing. It began as a drag strip in 1963, built by Charlie’s parents, Bill and Juanita, on 97 acres in Delmar, DE. An oval dirt track was added in 1965, then was moved and reconfigured twice to create the current half-mile in 1976. The property now also features a Go-Kart facility and an off-road truck course. Charlie and Joyce, married the spring after the first timed run down the dragstrip, have been there since the start. None of it came easy: construction blunders, lawsuits, overextended finances, driver boycotts—they were hit with it all in the early years. And they were trying to do the impossible: race two premier classes, both Modifieds and Late Models, every week. The Cathells couldn’t afford to pay purses comparable to tracks with a single headlining division. So Charlie built his fields by concentrating on superior track conditions and tire wear. The word got out: Pennsy’s Reading Fairgrounds was running on Fridays and Sundays in the 1970s; soon Reading standouts like Dave Kelly, the Brightbills, John Kozak and others were calling Delmar home on Saturday nights. Along with a crackerjack lineup of locals—Bunting, Browning, Breeding, Wilkins—it was a hell of a show. Big-blocks with no cubic inch limit running fuel injection, alcohol and drag rubber! In the outskirts of Modified country! On nights when URC Sprints were added to the card, the place was busting at the seams. Over the years, Charlie suffered two major setbacks: a stroke in 1996 and serious burns in a 2017 track accident. He battled back both times. In 1999, he was named National Auto Racing Promoter of the Year in Daytona Beach. Currently, son Mark Cathell and his wife Denise have taken the reins.

Racing journalist and historian Fred Voorhees, of Ringoes, NJ, will receive the Andrew S. Fusco Award for Media Excellence, in memory of Hall of Fame board member and legal counsel Andy Fusco. Voorhees was a wide-eyed five-year-old in 1963, perched in the Flemington Fair Speedway grandstands next to his grandfather, when he got hooked forever. His junior year in high school he wrote a letter to the local newspaper, Lambertville’s The Beacon, begging to write about racing. The publication gave him column space—with the stipulation that it must have a local interest. Fortunately, Flemington’s future driving star Billy Pauch lived right up the road—so he had a native hometown hero. Just for fun, Voorhees began documenting Pauch’s prolific win list in the 1990s, right about the time buddy Bill Braga Jr. started compiling rival driver Doug Hoffman’s records. Along with program publisher Steve Barrick and the late Flemington statistician Bill Hanna, Auto Racing Research Associates (ARRA) was born—an all-volunteer initiative to develop a free-to-use online reference library featuring driver, track, series and other racing statistics. Previously scattered in cyberspace or completely unaccounted for, Voorhees and crew painstakingly hunted down and organized all that information under one umbrella, creating a comprehensive database (https://sites.google.com/site/arradocumentingracinghistory/) that is thoroughly researched and diligently updated each week. Since it was launched with less than a dozen records in 1997, the ARRA site has exploded: at current count, 40 historians from across the country have contributed statistics on more than 600 subjects, preserving significant data that surely would have been lost to time. It has become a trusted, go-to resource for journalists, announcers and anyone who wants the facts. Along the way, Voorhees also wrote “The Last Lap” column which appeared in Gater Racing News for many years and handled PR duties for Flemington Fair Speedway.

Longtime racing photographer Jane Sauer Forcellina Cella—who has published under all three of her names—will be honored with this year’s Outstanding Woman in Racing Award. Growing up in Connecticut, Jane attended events at Danbury Racearena with her family from the time she was three. Everyone loved it: her older brother Skip bought a Limited Sportsman to race Orange County’s hard clay in 1968; Jane, at age 10, would ride her bike to his house after school, to help work on the car. She would have loved to race, too, when she came of age, but there wasn’t enough money. So she picked up a camera instead. A shy kid, Jane blossomed behind the lens. In 1978, as an amateur without press credentials, her photography gained notice at Orange County and fans began buying her images. That didn’t sit well with track photographer Bob Perran, who gave her an ultimatum: either work with him or be escorted off the property. It was an opportunity too good to pass up. Perran took her under his wing and got Jane her first press card from Area Auto Racing News in 1984. She began hitting the circuit hard, some years traveling to 100+ races, all while honing her craft, making the challenging transition from film to digital. Jane’s work has been featured in all the trade publications—AARN, Gater Racing News, Speedway Scene, National Speed Sport News, the magazines and in track programs, covering NASCAR and NHRA in addition to the local dirt. Shooting for 20+ years alongside fellow photographer Harry Cella, they eventually connected on a personal level, married in 2004 and Jane moved to his home in Rochelle Park, NJ. Nowadays, Cella finds herself at tracks like Fonda and Orange County, chronicling the racing careers of the third generation—the children and grandchildren of her 1980s subjects.

 
 
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