Last Thursday night, the RB Performance Super Late Model Series faced the toughest track on their schedule as they visited Rockingham Speedway. “The Rock” played host to the division’s 7th race of the season with a 100-lap feature event.
In time trials, David Krikorian picked up the fast lap to take his 12th career SARA pole. He would lead the top 8 cars into the Qualifying Dash, and he went on to lead every lap for the Dash win. An invert of two would flip the front row after the Dash for the feature event, which moved Trey Jarrell into first for the race, with Krikorian moving back to 2nd.
When the feature event got underway, Jarrell jumped out into the lead for the first 7 laps of the race, before Krikorian challenged for the lead and took over the top spot. After a pair of restarts, Jarrell made his way back to the lead on lap 35 and began to stretch the lead as he pulled away during the long green flag run. As the laps began to wind down, some cars began to face the possibility of running out of gas, until the caution came out when Jarrell spun around out of the lead on lap 90.
With the leader facing the wrong way for the caution, this handed the lead over to Matt Rolfe who had moved into 2nd. But with 90 lap old tires, the leaders all headed down pit road for their only set of extra tires, setting them up for a 6 lap dash to the finish. Rolfe jumped into the lead, but Krikorian was too strong on the short run and made him move to the lead on lap 96, and went on to lead the final five laps of the race to pick up his 15th career SARA victory, and his 3rd of the season.
Behind Krikorian, Blake Brown moved up late to take the 2nd spot, after running 4th for most of the race. Rolfe slipped back to a 3rd place finish, after he and Krikorian had battled for the 2nd spot during the long green flag run. Scott Dunlap started back in the 17th position and gained the most spots on the night as he finished in the 4th spot, his best career SARA SLM finish. Russell Berry rounded out the top five in 5th after running outside the top five for most of the race, which was also his best career SARA SLM finish.
Just outside the top five, James Linkiewicz, Todd Sipe, Dale Owen, Tony Tenney, and Kyle Holzhausen rounded out the top ten.
With the victory, David Krikorian breaks the tie and now sits alone at the top of the point standings by 106 points over 2nd place.