Scott Lindsay has often said that consistent top-five finishes add up to a track championship at the end of the summer.
In a car that wasn’t 100 per cent here last Friday night, the St. Marys racer had to fight for every inch to earn a fifth-place finish in the APC Late Model feature at Delaware Speedway Park.
It was his fourth top-five finish in five feature races to date.
It keeps Lindsay within striking distance of the points lead, but he acknowledged that he and the ‘20’ crew still have some fine-tuning to do on their Monte Carlo.
“We’ve changed so much on the car in the last couple of weeks,” Lindsay said following the race. “We’ve been having some problems, and we basically re-built it from the ground up.
“But the car was a little tight in the centre again. We couldn’t roll through (the corners) quite as good as the guys we were running against. It was close, we were almost wrecked a couple of times.
“We just have to go home and keep working on it. We’ll get it figured out, but it takes time. These cars have so many adjustments on them, and the competition is tough down here. Something is off just a little, but we’ll keep digging.”
Starts third in feature
Lindsay started third in a 17-car field for the 35-lap feature, and early in the race Windsor’s Duke Sawchuck got past pole-sitter Steve Robblee, of Dorchester.
There wasn’t much change to the running order, until Mt. Brydges’ Ron Sheridan was involved in a nasty crash on turn four of Lap 15—bringing out the race’s third caution flag.
Running on the top lane, Sheridan checked up when Lindsay and Southwold’s Jesse Kennedy tangled briefly, and his Pontiac was smashed into the wall after being drilled from behind by another racer. Sheridan’s No. 52 was towed off the track, and his night was finished.
“We hit the wall pretty hard,” Sheridan said. “It’s very disappointing, but all the safety stuff worked and I wasn’t hurt. We’ve had a really fast car, now we have a lot of work ahead to get it fast again.”
On the re-start, Lindsay lost a spot to Londoner Jonathan Urlin and was now sitting fourth.
For the next 18 laps, the St. Marys driver used every ounce of track experience to hold off both Kennedy and Kerwood’s Dion Verhoeven.
Finally, on turn three of the final lap, Kennedy slipped under both Lindsay and Urlin to grab third. Urlin was fourth, Lindsay fifth and Verhoeven sixth.
Sawchuck, meanwhile, managed to hold off Robblee and take his first checkered flag of the summer.
‘Pleasantly surprised’
After Friday’s racing, Robblee continues to sit in first place in the track standings with 420 points — 21 more than Sheridan. Kennedy is third with 390 points, three more than Lindsay. Sawchuck is a distant fifth with 369 points.
Robblee is “pleasantly surprised” to be leading the Late Model points chase to date. But the veteran driver says he still races for victories.
“At the start of this year, we were just getting back into (the Late Model division at Delaware), and our goal was to win a feature race. If a points championship comes, it’s great to win it, but there’s really no money in it,” Robblee said last Friday.
“We’re certainly not going to do anything exuberant to win the points (title). If a track championship comes, it will come with wins. We’re not going to be conservative.”
Strong second for Johns
St. Marys driver Shawn Johns certainly didn’t race conservatively last Friday. He posted his best finish of the summer in the 25-lap Challenger Motor Freight trucks feature race.
After starting 12th in an 18-truck field, Johns methodically worked his way from near the back of the field all the way up to claim a strong second-place finish.
It was Johns’ fourth top-five finish in six feature races to date.
The St. Marys trucker motored from sixth place to second over a stretch of eight laps (nine to 17).
“We dropped a few spots early, but we worked our way back through (the field),” Johns said. “We just picked them off, one truck at a time. You have to be patient, and your wait for an opening and they open up for you. You see what happens to trucks when they get rambunctious; they end up crashing.
“Our truck was working decent again this week, so we’ll take a second,” he added.
Thamesford’s Chad Rijnen cruised out front to win the trucks’ feature, with points leader Paul Fothergill, of London, a close third behind Johns.
The savvy Fothergill continues to sit atop the points standings with 481 points. Rijnen is second with 459, followed by Johns with 453. Mt. Elgin’s Jeff Showler is fourth with 446 points.
Track notebook:
•Scott Lindsay was second in his 10-lap Late Model heat race.
•Shawn Johns was sixth in his 10-lap trucks heat.
•Lindsay and the ‘20’ crew did a lot of work on their Monte Carlo during a two-week layoff leading up to last Friday’s racing.
“We spent every night in the shop (last) week, rebuilding it and going over stuff,” the veteran driver said. “The car was really good at the start of the year, for the first couple of weeks, and then it just didn’t seem to be right.
“We decided to start back at square one, disassemble the whole thing, and put all the parts back together. We also made some suspension changes, and it looks like we went the right way.”
•The Late Models, Trucks and Peterbilt of Ontario Super Stocks race this Friday, July 18.