It's Thursday again. That means it's time to roll the old Mini Stock out of the garage, wipe the dust off and shake down the setup with a spin around the dirt track at the end of the street. With that, here's the latest list of notes collected in a dog-eared notebook over the last few weeks...

* A FEW DAYS after having his first meeting with a NASCAR Sprint Cup organization, Derek Ramstrom admitted to feeling some added pressure heading into one of his busiest racing weeks of the year.

"It felt great to be approached by somebody with that much power," Ramstrom said, one day after testing a car at Oxford Plains Speedway for Sunday's TD Banknorth 250. "It definitely put a lot more stress on me in the (PASS race at Thompson last Saturday night). It's something you've just got to cope with, and I'm sure I'll learn to deal with it."

Fellow New Englander Mike Greci, the director of DEI's development program, met with Ramstrom for roughly half an hour last Saturday at Thompson. DEI typically considers 16-year-old drivers, which Ramstrom is, but offered no timetable on when they would let Ramstrom know anything further.

Ramstrom said he had no idea that he was generating any kind of buzz.

"I was really surprised," he said. "I didn't really know that that many people down south knew what we were doing. I definitely feel more confident that people I know exist. It's like I feel that I can compete against people with way more experience than I have."

Ramstrom will have to lean on that recently acquired confidence this weekend. With more than 115 entries in the TD Banknorth 250, qualifying for the main event will prove extremely difficult for the driver out of West Boylston, Mass., who has never driven a Late Model before.

He tested at Oxford on Tuesday and offered a less-than-glowing review of the performance.

"It's definitely different driving an ACT car. It was pretty frustrating," said Ramstrom, who has won three straight weekly features in Super Late Model competition at Thompson. "It's like I'm adjusting to the car and to the track at the same time, and flat tracks definitely aren't my favorite thing. But it's just something you've got to work with -- if somebody gives me a car to drive, I'm going to drive it to the best of my ability."

Ramstrom said he plans to put in plenty of track time this weekend.

"We're going to be there Friday and be there the whole weekend (to practice)," Ramstrom said. "I was getting pretty frustrated, so it will be good to go out and kind of race around with other cars and see what they do. I felt like I was going pretty slow, because it's definitely a different feeling than my other race cars."

* I"M HEARING THAT there will be "fewer" big races on the Wiscasset Raceway schedule in 2009.

The track is expected to do away with many of the automatic qualifiers for the Street Stock and Sportsman Nationals events in October, races held as part of the season-ending championship weekend for PASS at Wiscasset.

Guaranteed entrance into the multi-thousand-dollar shows, plus a bigger winner's purse for the individual qualifiers, hasn't generated enough interest from non-Wiscasset competitors to continue staging the races. The actual Nationals races are believed to be safe.

- SO NOW GEORGE Fernald, the operating manager at Unity Raceway, is faced with his biggest issue of his young tenure at the facility. Despite shortening several feature distances in the interest of time, last Friday night's race program featured 10 different divisions and a running time of some five and a half hours.

Some sort of an arrangement has to be made to tighten up the overall presentation. A packed pit area and a grandstand attendance that has more than doubled since the beginning of the season is all well and good, but to keep the paying customers coming back every week, the show can run on forever.

And ever.

Combining the Thursday and Friday night divisions into one package was sound reasoning on a number of levels. But some of the old Thursday classes -- the Peanuts, Ladies, Teens and Enduros -- have to be combined in some manner or put on a rotating schedule.

The quickest interim fix: Just abolish heat racing altogether and run features only.

* WATCHING YANKEE FANS boo Jonathan Papelbon, the Boston Red Sox closer, during the All-Star Game on Tuesday night only made me chuckle.

Boo all you want.

And when the real games are being played in October, and you're team is sitting on the sidelines, you can keep on booing, too. We won't even hear you.

Something about two World Series wins in four years does that to you. That, and having the closer that has surpassed Mariano Rivera as the game's most dominant.

* I STILL CAN'T figure out for the life of me how Rick Martin finished second in the Pepsi 75 for the PASS North Series at Thompson last weekend.

If he was penalized for jumping the final restart -- which is what a PASS press release stated two days later -- than he should be scored as the last car on the lead lap at the very least.

It appears to be just another case of PASS trying to appease everybody and, in the process, appeasing nobody. I'll keep an asterisk next to the finishing order.

Furthermore, why does it seem that PASS is the only organization around that won't simply recall a bad restart to line it up and do it again? I know they don't want drivers stealing wins, and I wholeheartedly support the notion -- but if you really want to send a message, put the yellow flag back out, give the leader the black flag and send him to the back. On the spot.

Think drivers would get the message then?

* IT MAY NOT be the "other 250" PASS hoped it would become when it was run last year, but the CARQUEST Pro Stock Tour takes over this year at Riverside Speedway in Antigonish, Nova Scotia -- where Mainers Johnny Clark and Travis Benjamin will join Sprint Cup drivers Regan Smith and Aric Almirola in the IWK 250.

The event guarantees $10,000 to win and more than $13,000 in additional awards. The race is slated for Saturday night.

Posted at 1:35 a.m. by TBarrett