The New Hampshire Motor Speedway played host to the NEO Racing News SK Shootout Series on Monday night, and The Magic Mile would see 21 cars hit the track for the 75-lap feature event.
In time trials, Ty Majeski set the fast lap as the only car to break into the 31-second barrier, and picked up his league leading 41st career SARA pole. He led the top 8 cars into the Qualifying Dash, and had no trouble as he pulled away and took the Dash win. An invert of 6 after the Dash would send Majeski back to the 6th position for the feature, while Bill Martin was inverted to the front.
As the race got underway, Bill Martin led the race early for the first 21 laps, but a trio of back-to-back cautions would force Martin to retire early from mechanical issues. This handed the lead over to Michael German and he would take over for the next 11 laps. But it was Majeski who started working his way back towards the front, and made his move into the lead on lap 33. It wasn’t easy for Majeski out front though as the top four cars ran nose-to-tail throughout the remainder of the race, but Majeski was able to hold off the pack and went on to lead the final 43 laps to pick up his 4th victory of the season, and his league leading 40th career SARA victory.
Behind Majeski, it was points leader Cody Kellwy who ran in the 2nd spot until the final lap where Kelley would get loose trying to make one last run, and his car would end up facing the wrong direction as the field raced back to the finish without him. Ryan Borges was right there to take that spot away and would end up finishing 2nd after a strong run that saw him contending out front all race long. After leading earlier in the event, German continued to race with the lead pack and ended up picking up the 3rd spot to round out the podium. Matt Rolfe and Todd Sipe battled for the remaining top five spots in the closing laps, and Rolfe would prevail to take 4th, while Sipe rounded out the top five in 5th.
Just outside the top five, Patrick Hahe picked up his best SK finish of the season with a 6th place run. Ian Layne started towards the back and made a last lap effort to get into the top five but would end up finishing in the 7th spot. Matt Eddy also started way out back in the 20th spot and would end up being the biggest mover of the night as he worked his way up into an 8th place finish. Jarrett Lawrence made his first start in almost two months and would end up with a solid 9th place finish, with Russell Berry right behind him, finishing out the top ten in the 10th position.
With two drop weeks being factored into the points after last night’s race, Cody Kelley remains in the points lead after 8 weeks of the season by 53 points in the standings.