Just as it was the night before, Bacon put his Bob East-wrenched, FMR Racing/Brown & Miller Racing Solutions – Black Watch Farms/Beast/Toyota anywhere he pleased, running the bottom between turns one and two and using a diamond pattern on the other end of the racetrack, in which he’d enter on the cushion in turn three and exit turn four on the bottom.
The interval between he and Thorson continued to expand in the final laps, growing to a substantial 4.5 second margin as Bacon took the checkered ahead of Thorson, Tyler Courtney, Rico Abreu (who charged from 22nd to fourth after flipping earlier in the night during time trials) and Kevin Thomas Jr.
“We had to work a little harder tonight,” Bacon said. “We were able to get to the front really quickly and then the track changed quite a bit. It got pretty treacherous with some holes on the bottom. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time every time and made some good decisions.”
“I’m just glad to have a car I can be confident moving around in, especially here. You’ve got a lot of options and there’s a big difference between the top and bottom. The car worked great wherever it went. We’ve worked so hard and, last year, we got our package together and we’re finally getting the results to show for all that hard work.”
Thorson followed up a third-place run the night before with a second-place finish Sunday night in his Keith Kunz-Curb-Agajanian Motorsports/JBL Audio – TRD/Bullet by Spike/Speedway Toyota.
“We just took what it gave us tonight,” Thorson said. “We’ve had a pretty good car here the last two days. We definitely wanted to win that one, but Brady just beat us. He was better through the holes tonight, but we’ll back and we’ll come to the next race even stronger.”
Courtney took a wild tumble while running third in Saturday night’s feature at Kokomo. Sunday night, the team rolled out the backup car and took down a well-earned third-place finish in his Clauson-Marshall Racing/Driven 2 Save Lives – Indiana Donor Network/Spike/Stanton SR-11.
“After the start I’ve had this year in the midget and sprint car, to get a podium here is a pretty good confidence booster,” a rejuvenated Courtney smiled. “Hopefully, moving forward from here will be just a little smoother sailing than the start of the year. I can’t thank everybody who came to the shop last night and busted their butts enough.”
“We found out just last night that our car was junk and they finished putting this backup car together, came back to the track and the team kept faith in me. I’ve got all the faith in the world in them and their race cars and what they do in the shop. I think it showed tonight.”
Full results can be viewed on the next page…
