INDIANAPOLIS – Brady Bacon couldn’t have picked a bigger stage to notch his first USAC P1 Insurance National Midget Series win of the season than Thursday night’s Driven2SaveLives BC39 presented by NOS Energy Drink at The Dirt Track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Bacon, who came into IMS carrying a near year-long drought with the FMR Racing No. 76, charged late in the 39-lap feature to capture the $15,000 winner’s share at the quarter-mile dirt oval nestled inside turn three of the famed 2.5-mile speedway.
The Broken Arrow, Okla., native used a pristine turn-four slide job on lap 31 to wrest the top spot away from polesitter and race-long leader Kevin Thomas Jr., charging to Thomas’ inside as the duo raced in and out of lap traffic and never losing control again after that.
Bacon paced the final nine circuits en route to the historic win, the seventh of his USAC National Midget career. He took the checkered flag with a half-second margin over runner-up Chad Boat.
“This team just steps up when it comes time for the big races and the big money,” said Bacon, who started seventh in the main event. “I can’t thank them enough for that. Frank (Manafort, team owner) and these guys put their blood, sweat and tears into this program and it shows. This is a good first one (of the season) … especially with all the hard work that went into today just to get it to happen with all the weather.
“I hope it turned out to be a great race. I know I was holding my breath for a few laps, trying to get by KT (Thomas),” Bacon noted. “He’s such a hard racer, but I knew I had my chance when he hit that lap traffic. We’re usually one of the best on the bottom groove, but tonight the track was so tricky with the cushion being so big after all that rain we had early in the day. That’s what we gambled on and shot for with our car, was to get a lot of acceleration off the bottom, and it paid off for us tonight.”
After rains drenched IMS for most of the day, the call was made to alter the format, taking the top 24 in passing points and two provisionals directly to the BC39 feature and scrapping the remaining alphabet mains.
That placed Kevin Thomas Jr. and Tyler Courtney on the front row for the $15,000-to-win spectacular, with Thomas jumping out to the early lead when the green flag waved over the field.
After being hounded by Courtney for the first three laps, Thomas slowly began to extend his margin out front, holding a one second lead by the lap 12 benchmark when Bacon charged past Courtney to move into second.
What followed was a heap of mid-race calamity, as back-to-back cautions on lap 13 slowed the pace and bunched the field back together. The first incident came in turns three and four, when a six-car pileup nearly blocked the track, collecting Shane Cottle, Tucker Klaasmeyer, Brayton Lynch and Tyler Thomas among the casualties.
