DON COLLINS’ CAREER WINS

When we decided to create the statistical history for the Waterford Speedbowl in 2005, there was only 1 known publication of Speedbowl history:  A Racing History of the New London-Waterford Speedbowl by John Brouwer & Dave Shippee.  This book is a wonderful piece of racing history and provides brief summaries of each season, numerous photos and win totals for every division for each of the track’s first 23 seasons (1951-1973).  It does not, however, list the winners of each event week by week as our research does, it only provides win totals.  While we used the Brouwer/Shippee book as a reference, the stats within speedbowlhistory.com reflect our own research and unfortunately it varies from their book. 

This includes a significant difference when it comes to Don Collins, one of the Speedbowl’s greatest competitors of all time and whose entire career (1951-1969) is covered in full by Brouwer’s book.  His listed total is 100 feature wins – 94 in the Modifieds and 6 in the Non-Ford division.  Collins 100 wins was well-known as the most in Speedbowl history since the book was published in 1974. 

Although we would prefer our research to match, unfortunately it doesn’t for all stats.  For Don Collins, our research tally is a total of 101 wins, 95 in the Modifieds and 6 in the Non-Fords. 

We have been able to narrow the discrepancy down to 3 seasons: 

• 1953 – Brouwer book credits Collins w/ a Team Race win (we acknowledge Team Races as exhibitions, not included in our Career Wins stats)
• 1957 – we found 12 Modified wins (Brouwer book has 11 wins listed)
• 1968 – we found 6 Modified wins for Collins (Brouwer book has 5 wins listed)

This gives our research a net +1 to Brouwer’s 100 total, giving Collins 101 feature wins.  Because we would prefer our research to match Brouwer/Shippee’s, we continually review all of Don Collins’ wins and the resources we have to confirm the results.  We continually come up with 101 wins and have the resources (mostly New London Day archives for Don Collins’ wins) to back up our research.

We are always willing to look at new data or information and, like any other results listed on our site, would revise our data accordingly if we were to find any new info.  If you have any information that can help us, please contact us with the details.