From www.Speed51.com by Mike Twist:
Last season, Johnny Clark won the DNK 250 after some
late race fireworks and you couldnt imagine a happier driver. This season, those
fireworks blew up in his hand when he tangled with Mike Rowe on lap 248. It was pretty
much a deal of hard racing between two chargers, but Clark was still down in the dumps
after the race was over and he was left with a fourth-place finish.I could have really used the 12 grand [to win] and we should have
been two-for-two with 250s here, said Clark. We really had the dominant car in
the race here I feel. So Im disappointed. We were riding around and riding around
and our pit strategy worked out incredibility. We had four new tires and were suiting
behind four cars that had 50 laps on their tires. The car was just too tight after a
restart.
The front end would not turn at all. It was like that on the restarts and would come
out of it after six laps, but having a restart with five to go I knew wouldnt be
good. It would have been good enough to win the race though.
The restart and the wreck is shown in the photo
sequence below.
The deal for making the Unity 250 a PASS event was that the Unity finish could be
counted instead of a team's worst placing for the PASS points standings. Johnny gets to
count the fourth at Unity instead of the 19th at the Oxford Triple 50s and picks up 30
points, significantly tightening the points race with Ben Rowe and Cassius Clark who did
not benefit that much from their Unity finishes. However, those two still have their Unity
points
"in the bank" to use against a disastrous finish in the remaining races. |