Kimmel scores another top-five at Springfield

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (Aug. 18, 2013) — Frank Kimmel’s 80th career ARCA Racing Series presented by Menards victory, as well as his ninth career checkered flag at the Illinois State Fair, will have to wait.

But after a helter-skelter final few laps in Sunday’s Allen Crowe Memorial 100 on the fairgrounds’ one-mile dirt oval, Kimmel could still summon a smile after he finished fourth in his No. 44 Ansell / Menards Toyota, behind second-time 2013 winner Brennan Poole.

“It was very exciting those last few laps,” Kimmel said. “Everybody was going for it — people jumped the (last) start and that made a mess of everything — but all-in-all it was a good day…

“At it least it was a good points day because we didn’t run like we should.  We didn’t quite get the setup like we should’ve and I think the track changed on us, and due to the short practice we weren’t able to work on it a whole lot.”

The bottom line was that Kimmel — who led 20 laps in the middle portion of the race when crew chief Jeriod Prince’s pit strategy shuffled Kimmel’s Camry to the front from laps 51 to 70, where he was able to hold on for a whille — scored his 25th consecutive top-10 finish.

But even more important than that, when Kimmel’s chief championship contender, Mason Mingus, had a mechanical issue with his car late in the race that relegated the Tennessee teenager to a 16th-place finish, Kimmel opened-up his widest lead of the season in the standings.

With seven races remaining, pending the release of ARCA’s official standings Tuesday morning, Kimmel has a 245-point lead over Mingus.

That didn’t seem plausible early in Sunday’s lone one-hour practice, when a rock deranged a line to the car’s carburetor, which caused a brief engine fire and a long delay in the car practicing.

Kimmel’s ThorSport Racing crew got the No. 44 out for 12 laps at the end of the slightly-extended practice and Kimmel was ready to race, after qualifying 11th in Menards Pole Qualifying presented by Ansell.

Kimmel was pleased with how Prince’s strategy worked out.

“When you don’t have a car that can win, you have to work on beating them somewhere else,” Kimmel said. “We were a little behind on our chassis and didn’t quite have the speed a couple of the other cars did. If the final caution had come out with 25 or 30 laps to go, I think by the end of the day we were going to be one of the fastest cars.”

The final caution created a green-white-checkered finish and even though local dirt-racing hero Kelly Kovski took the checkers first, he and two other drivers were penalized fpr jumping the restart, which moved Kimmel to fourth.

“We led some laps, got up front and it was a good points day,” Kimmel said in summary. “When you can take a bad day and come out good with it, that’s a good day, especially when you look at how this championship can change in a heartbeat.”