On Monday night, the NEO Racing News SK Shootout Series made the trip to Florida to battle for 100 laps at the New Smyrna Speedway for the 9th race of their season.
In time trials, Ty Majeski picked up the fast time for his league leading 42nd career pole. He would lead the top 8 cars into the Qualifying Dash and had no troubles as he jumped into the lead and held off Cody Kelley and Ty Spearman for the win. After the Dash, a random invert of 3 would send Majeski back to 3rd to start the race while Spearman was inverted to the front.
When the green flag flew for the feature event, Spearman jumped into the lead with Majeski in tow behind him. But that lead was short lived as Majeski made his move on lap 5 to the lead, just before the first caution of the race flew. From there, Majeski would maintain control on each restart throughout the race, and went on to dominate by leading the final 96 laps of the race to pick up his 5th SK Modified win of the season, and his 41st career SARA victory.
Behind Majeski was a three car battle as Spearman, Kelley and Bill Martin all swapped spots inside the top four a number of times throughout the race. Martin used a late race restart to move up into the 2nd spot and would hang on to finish there as a caution came out to end the race. Spearman would round out the podium in 3rd, while Kelley would pick up a 4th place finish. The 5th spot also changed hands all race long, with Blake Brown taking the position to round out the top five after moving up through the field during the 2nd half of the race.
Just outside the top five, Cody Leland would finish 6th after rebounding from an early race spin, which was his best finish in the league since the Summer of 2014. Matt Eddy had a solid run, working his way up from his 14th place starting spot to move up to a 7th place finish in the late stages of the race. Patrick Hahe floated just outside the top ten for a majority of the race but worked his way up to an 8th place finish. After a strong run in the Qualifying Dash, Brandon Wilkinson decided to start shotgun on the field and was able to pick his way towards the front for a 9th place finish, with Michael Baxter rounding out the top ten after recovering from an incident with just 26 laps to go.
With his 4th place finish, Cody Kelley maintains the points lead and extends it out to 75 points over 2nd place, heading into next week’s race at Stafford.