On Tuesday night, the Sportsman Street Stock Series visited the New Smyrna Speedway for their week 9, 75-lap event. Going into the night, the points battle was tight at the top of the standings, but some of the heavy hitters would show up and showed their strength early. In qualifying, Ty Majeski would grab the pole with a lap time of 20.516 seconds for his 18th career SARA pole.
Majeski would lead the field to the green flag and got the jump over Justin Brooks to take the lead early on. The top two would begin to separate themselves a little bit from the rest of the field as a lengthy green flag run would start the race, but Majeski would begin to pull away out front. Brooks began to drop back a little bit, where behind him Cody Kelley looked strong in the early laps as was keeping pace in the 3rd spot. Behind the top 3, Bill Martin was on the move as he would move into the top 5 in the early laps, and would get by Matt Rolfe by lap 10 to move into 4th.
As Majeski continued to pull away out front, Kelley was putting pressure on Brooks for the 2nd spot. He would take the spot from him by lap 18, but at that point, Majeski had already pulled out to a 1.8 second lead. Martin would continue his charge during the run, and also chased down Brooks to take the 3rd spot on lap 25. The first caution of the race would come out on lap 34, which would bunch the field back together and gave drivers a chance to make a pit stop and make adjustments on their cars.
While most of the field headed down pit road, Kevin Myers would stay out on older tires to gain some track position and would hold the lead for the next restart. Rolfe would win the race off pit road with a two-tire pit stop to move up into 2nd, with the rest of leaders right behind the with newer tires, and the newer tires would prevail on the restart. Just a lap after taking the green flag, Majeski made his way into the lead once again, shuffling Myers and Rolfe backwards on the outside. Both Kelley and Martin would follow Majeski in the bottom groove and would work their way back up into 2nd and 3rd, as Brooks was also charging up into the 4th spot after losing some positions on pit road.
After another caution on lap 46, the field would head to the next restart on lap 51 with Majeski getting the jump into the lead once again. Kelley was able to settle back into 2nd, while Brooks moved into 3rd on the restart. But once again Martin was looking to grab the spot, and would take it from Brooks by lap 58. Behind the top 4, Rolfe was looking to hold off Ty Spearman for the 5th spot, but Spearman would get by to move into the top 5 just before the next caution would come out on lap 62.
With the late caution, the field wasn’t able to get anymore green flag racing in, as another caution would come out directly after the lap 68 restart, which led to the race ending under caution. This would allow Majeski to coast around for the win, after having the dominant car in the race, leading 70 out of the 75 laps en route to the victory. The win would be Majeski’s 4th of the season, and his 22nd career SARA win. Kelley would finish off his strong run with a 2nd place finish, followed by Martin who finished in 3rd. Brooks would settle into a 4th place finish, with Spearman taking the 5th spot.
Next week the series will head to Phoenix for their first ever trip to the one-mile track for a 50-lap event.
With another top 10, Ken Belanger continues to hang onto the points lead, and extended it out to 11 points heading into next week’s event. For full results and standings, click HERE.