NASCAR Hall of Fame inductees Rusty Wallace and Joe Gibbs will headline a busy day of pre-race activities leading up to Saturday’s Shore Lunch 150 for the ARCA Menards Series at Iowa Speedway.
Wallace, the 1989 NASCAR Cup Series champion, will participate in an autograph session alongside his son Steven and the other drivers on the concourse between qualifying and the race. The elder Wallace is a 55-time Cup Series winner and is now a member of the broadcast team on MRN Radio. He is also the designer of Iowa Speedway. Steven is a four-time ARCA Menards Series winner, including the very first race ever run at Iowa Speedway in 2006. They will both be honored on the pre-race stage with Rusty driving the pace car leading the field to the green flag.
Gibbs, a three-time Super Bowl-winning head coach in the NFL and a 200-time winner across the nationally-touring NASCAR series, will offer the invocation before the start. Gibbs grandson Ty Gibbs has won five ARCA Menards Series races in 2021 and 13 times overall in his brief career. He also won in his NASCAR Xfinity Series debut on the road course at Daytona International Speedway in February and followed with a win at Charlotte Motor Speedway in May.
NASCAR vice-chairman Mike Helton will also be in attendance on Saturday, celebrating the 16th season of racing at the 0.875-mile D-shaped oval located about 30 minutes east of Des Moines in Newton. Ron Hutcherson, Larry Clement, and Mason Mitchell, three Iowans who have won ARCA Menards Series championships, will also be in attendance and honored during pre-race activities. Hutcherson is a three-time series champion, winning three straight from 1972 through 1974; Clement in a nine-time champion, providing cars for driver Frank Kimmel as they dominated from 1997 through 2007; and Mitchell won the championship driving for a family-owned team in 2014. NASCAR fan favorite Ken Schrader, a 19-time ARCA Menards Series winner, will also be in attendance.
In addition to the driver autograph session featuring the Wallaces, Schrader, and the Iowa ARCA legends, other fan activities on the concourse include displaying Clement’s first ARCA racecar – a superspeedway car originally built by Hendrick Motorsports for NASCAR Hall of Famer Buddy Baker – the Sioux Chief sim racing gaming trailer, the Van Wall John Deere display, and a cornhole tournament. There will also be live music behind the grandstands and the night will be punctuated with a fireworks display.
Advance discounted tickets are available for the Shore Lunch 150 at each of the Menards locations throughout Iowa. For more information, please visit IowaSpeedway.com and ARCARacing.com.
ARCA PR
