PORT ROYAL, Pa. (March 21) — Gregg Satterlee and his crew chief, Robby Allen, are unabashed Port Royal Speedway boosters.

And after Satterlee swept the half-mile oval’s Saturday-Sunday Zimmer’s United Late Model Series doubleheader — giving the Indiana, Pa., driver seven Port Royal victories since last June — they became even bigger fanboys.

Watch full coverage from the ULMS doubleheader at Port Royal

“I don’t mind racing here,” Satterlee, 36, said with a sheepish smile in Port Royal’s sun-splashed pit area after capturing the $4,000 top prize in Sunday’s 35-lap feature. “It’s really good.”

“I always have liked coming here for the last 10 years since they finally started getting the (surface) racy,” added Allen, a 50-year-old mechanical veteran who has visited tracks in virtually every nook-and-cranny of the country.

Ask either man about Port, and you receive a virtual itemized list of the joint’s positive attributes.

“I always try to talk it up because they do do a phenomenal job,” Satterlee said. “They spend lots of money on the place, which they’re fortunate to be able to do, but they treat the racers good, they’re always making improvements, they pay good money, they’re always looking to do the right thing. You’re not gonna go too many places where you get all that.

“I always tell people that we’re fortunate to have a racetrack like this to race at that’s just two-and-a-half hours from home.”

“We were talking about that the other night,” Allen added, “and somebody, they were asking to compare this place to (Iowa’s) Knoxville (Raceway), and I said, ‘This place is Knoxville. It’s just an hour-and-a-half from my house (in Hagerstown, Md., where he maintains Satterlee’s family-owned equipment) instead of 16 hours from my house.’

“It’s a fairgrounds. It’s in a little town where the people care about the racetrack. The promoters and the fair board care about the racetrack. The track is always good. It’s not (The Dirt Track at) Charlotte, it’s not the best facility you ever go to, but they keep it up and keep doing work to make it better. I mean, it’s an 80-year-old fairgrounds. It’s not gonna be Charlotte Motor Speedway or even Virginia Motor Speedway, but you can’t beat coming here.

“People treat you good … and it’s racy,” he added. “Even today, it was the least racy as it could be, and we still started sixth and won. You could still move around enough to pass somebody.”

Satterlee succinctly summed up Port Royal: “And they do a good job with the racetrack, so you know if you come here and you don’t have the best car, you’re probably not gonna win. You’re probably not gonna have a fourth-place car and, just because you start on the pole, you’re gonna win. I started sixth today and I don’t know if I had the best car, but our car was really good and you’re able to get to the front.”

It wasn’t an easy advance to the front from the third row for Satterlee, certainly not as smooth as his run in Saturday’s 30-lap feature in which he came off the outside pole to grab the lead from Michael Norris of Sarver, Pa., on the 13th circuit. But even with the track surface harder and, in some spots, more rubbered than Saturday — Sunday’s earlier start, at 2 p.m., baked the clay under a bright sun for two additional hours — he couldn’t be stopped.

“It was pretty rubbered in that feature — not latched super hard, but pretty hard,” Satterlee said. “The tires are wore. We ran a different tire combination (from Saturday) because the track was different, way different from normal. You had to just take advantage of the restarts.”

Satterlee jumped out of the starting gate well, moving up to fourth on the opening lap and taking third from Max Blair of Centerville, Pa., on lap two. Then he came off the outside on a lap-four restart to overtake both Jeff Rine of Danville, Pa., and Norris, who started on the pole and led from the start, and assume command for good on lap five.

The extreme outside of turns one and two was where Satterlee knew he had to make his time. The thin cushion there maintained a modicum of moisture because the high steel guardrail provided some shade from the sun.

“Yeah, but off of (turn) two there was none,” Satterlee said of the abrupt end of the track’s top-side grip. “I’m sure that’s what led up to (Rick) Eckert and I getting together (off turn two on lap four in a scrape that sent Eckert spinning backward toward the inside guardrail and out of the race). He was in the rubber and I wasn’t. I ran around that top because that’s how I passed a couple guys, and you’re not gonna go under ‘em when they’re in the rubber, so I just tried to make a corner or two up there and then he was in (the rubber) and I was coming back to it (from the top).

“There’s a tire mark on the left-rear quarterpanel (of Satterlee’s car). I felt (the contact), but … I don’t know. It’s just a racing deal I call it. I guess if it was the other way around I’d have to say, ‘I either should’ve crashed you or I should’ve lifted.’ I mean, that stuff’s happened to me before. It was maybe just wrong place, wrong time, for both of us.

“I did the exact same thing to Norris (to take the lead after the lap-four restart), but I passed him and got back in front of him and got to the bottom,” he continued. “It was kind of a risky line to use because it was so bad until you got back to about halfway down the back straightaway, but if you hit it and got enough momentum up you could go so much faster in and through the corner. You had to do it about one lap and then bail on it, but it worked.”

So the Port Royal beat rolled on for Satterlee, who has made the track in the central Pennsylvania hills his home away from home since he ended his two-year chase of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series following the 2018 season. Last year he won five times in eight starts at Port Royal — he also had two third-place runs and one DNQ — and in ’19 he finished as high as second while placing worse than sixth once in five races.

Overall, since Satterlee reached victory lane for the first time at Port Royal on Sept. 1, 2012, in a Three State Flyers series event, he’s tallied an impressive performance record of 11 victories among 20 top-five and 24 top-10 finishes in 28 starts.

“We got our car really good (at Port Royal),” Satterlee said of his 2020 XR1 Rocket machine, which now sports a fresh white-and-blue color scheme as opposed to the black-dominated look he’s displayed in recent years (he also has a brand-new car awaiting its first race that is white with neon yellow accents). “It’s just well balanced, goes around there really good. It just does what it needs to do. It can make speed, it has traction. It just does it all.

“Last night was the first time we had really changed anything here (over the past two years). With all those wins (in 2020), that’s one thing about winning at the same place — you don’t want to get out of your box too far. You screw it up and you start second-guessing what you should’ve done, but we ran the same exact setup that we did last night and it was good again.”

Satterlee’s two-race sweep worth $7,000, which came by significant margins (3.526 seconds on Saturday, 3.947 seconds on Sunday) and over solid fields (47 cars on Saturday, 45 on Sunday), provided Allen a good read on the team’s chances for success in this year’s six national-level events at Port Royal. Red-circle dates on Satterlee’s calendar include Port’s Lucas Oil Series shows on April 18 and Aug. 26-28 and a World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model Series doubleheader on May 21-22.

“It’s good to come here against good cars and think, Maybe if there were some even better cars here we could still be pretty good, too,” Allen said.

For Satterlee, the triumphs on familiar turf helped him move forward following his frustrating season-opening trip to Georgia-Florida Speedweeks in January.

“I’m gonna take a camper down there next year, just have lawn chairs and food and watch,” Satterlee joked of his Speedweeks results, which this year produced just a single top-10 finish (seventh) in seven Lucas Oil appearances. “We’ve ran down there good here and there, but I don’t know … it’s so much about wheelspin, and I just don’t race well in those conditions.

“Obviously, this must be more what I’m good at,” he added. “It was a good weekend. Two-race weekend sweeps aren’t easy to come by, and there was a pretty good group of cars here. We’ll be back (to Port Royal) in a couple weeks (for April 3’s $3,000-to-win regular show).”