The Quest For the Holy Grail has finally found it's seven knights after the events of Tuesday evening came to a hault. Coming into last night, QSM had a considerable four-race winning streak. The streak was extended to five and six after Ryan Heuser fought his way from the rear of the field in the first two events to win them both. R2W's Ken Pettit won the career stats race, giving R2W their first Shootout Series win in 15 races. The first third of the season was dominatied by no one driver. Six of the first seven events this season had different representitives in victory lane. The points leader after the first 15 races was Tim McDonnell. He started the season off with a 13-race top-5 streak, which is the longest in Shootout Series history. Timmy extended his points lead through the middle third of the season and only ascended from there. Through races 16 to 30, Tim and Ryan Heuser won 11 of them, ensuring their top chase seedings. The most poles, most wins (tied with Ryan), most top-5's, most top-10's (tied with Craig), most laps led, and least DNF's all belong to Tim McDonnell. Ryan Heuser has the highest average finish of the season (1.91), which will also shatter the record books if he keeps the pace up. He also has an 11-race winning streak of his own, two away from the record that Timmy set earlier in the season. The most Driver of the Knight's this season belongs to Ryan Heuser with three. Speedy grabbed his inagural Driver of the Knight award on week 5, grabbing a win at Daytona and two Top-5's at Loudon and Zen Joltis. NASCAR Racing 4 veteran Matt Raboin and sophomore drivers Tony Long & Cristian Torres narrowly missed the chase. They along with the others who couldn't muscle their way in will continue to fight for the 8th-man award, Team Championship, and Manufacturer's Championship for the final third of the season.
Everything remains possible for Season 9. Lets grab first gear and ride it out, as only one shall be King!
The #29 Cheez-It Chevy team continued to celebrate in Gatorade Victory Lane at Daytona well into the wee hours of the morning. Not only had Ben Geer made his first NR2003 trip to Victory Lane but he did it in "Michael Waltrip" style. He won his first career race in the biggest of the season. In a race that officially only saw 2 caution periods, racing was extremely close all through the field. Until green flag pitstops you could have spit at the first truck and just missed the last one. TEX Perry captured the pole at the famed 2.5 mile superspeedway with Tony Pizzaro to his outside. At the drop of the green Tex jumped out to what he had hoped would be his first lap led of the Fall.Winter season. While just behind him Tim McDonnell had jumped to the upper lane just in front of Pizzaro and officially led the first 3 laps of the season. The two continued to run side-by-side for the first 4 laps until Tex just edged ahead of the 31. Many wondered if these first laps would set the pace for the entire season to come. Shortly thereafter Tex dropped to the apron as the field took to the backstretch and relegated himself to the back of the field. Approaching the first pitstops of the day the first of 2 cautions flew when initial leader Tim McDonnell was bounced into the outside wall almost destroying the rear of his truck. Teams patched him up and Tim would remain a contender all night long. Teams would have to dodge trucks for most of the middle of the race when 2 non-caution producing wrecks regulated good trucks to the rear of the field. The
later of these 2 incidents happened when JT Armstrong(admitting fault in the incident) would get turned off the front of another truck and spin to the infield just past pit road. JT would never recover from going a lap down. The final green flag stops would set up the #29 in
front with the #56 of defending champion Rod Weston behind him coming off pit road. Though Rod would fight hard to defend his Daytona performance from last season Ben would hold on to gain not only the points lead heading into Martinsville, next week, but his first ever NR2003 win and one for the record books.
