Hamilton Builds Early Lead En Route To First Win

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The RB Performance Super Late Model Series ran the second event of their season this past Thursday night as the division headed up north to the Stafford Motor Speedway for a 125-lap feature race.

Casey Kelley put down the fastest lap in Time Trial when he ran a 18.834 second lap to pick up his 13th career SARA pole. 32 drivers attempted to qualify for the race but only the top 25 cars made the field based on times, with a couple provisionals handed out to make a grid of just 30 cars, sending two cars home early. The top ten cars advanced into the Qualifying Dash, and a 8-car invert dropped Kelley back while Bill Brown was inverted to the front. Brown had no issues in the Dash and went on to pick up the victory.

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Brown led the field back to the green flag in the feature event and quickly jumped out to a few car length lead as the field settled in behind him. The race opened up with a 21-lap green flag run, and with Brown out front, one driver that was making a charge was Camaron Hamilton who quickly moved up from 5th up to 2nd and was making a run at the top spot. On lap 21, Hamilton made his move to the inside for the lead into turn one, but while Brown tried to fall back in line behind him, the hole was filled up and contact from behind turned Brown around and into the wall. A couple more cautions came out during the next 30 laps of the race, setting up a restart on lap 52 with Hamilton still out front controlling the race.

The restart set up a 73-lap green flag run to the finish, and it allowed Hamilton to try and pull away at the front of the field. Hamilton’s lead extended out to just over 1.5 seconds, until David Krikorian moved up into the 2nd position by lap 80, and he slowly began to reel in the leader. By lap 100, the lead out front had shrunk to under a second, and Krikorian continued to charge, but as the laps wound down the leaders’ lap times had evened out and Hamilton was holding steady out front. In the closing laps, the lead shrunk down to just over .5 seconds, but Hamilton was too strong and used the lead he had built earlier to hold on out front, and he came around to pick up the checkered flag. Hamilton’s win was his first career SARA victory.

Behind Hamilton, Krikorian came up a little short on his charge to the front and ended up finishing in 2nd. Cody Thompson tied his best Super Late Model finish with a 3rd place run after picking his way through the field from 13th. Jason Williams also came from just outside the top ten and made his way towards the front to finish in 4th. Davey Riendeau spent most of his race battling right around the top five, give or take a few spots, but ultimately settled into a 5th place finish.

Just outside the top five, Cody Erdmann picked up his best career SARA points finish, recovering from a spin in one of the early cautions to work his way back up into 6th. Matt Rolfe also recovered from a spin just prior to lap 50 and worked his way back up into a 7th place finish. Richard Bruce started back in the 20th spot but made his way inside the top ten before lap 50 where he spent most of his race battling and ended up finishing in 8th. Newcomers Shane Bogue and Jared Turnbull both started deep in the field and made their way up into top ten finishes. Bogue made steady progress during the early stages of the race to crack the top ten to finish 9th, while Turnbull recovered from an early spin and made his way back up to finish 10th.

With the victory, Camaron Hamilton now takes over the points lead in the standings and will lead the field into next week’s race at Irwindale with a 10 point lead.

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