If you asked Nick Thrash how his season had been going Saturday prior to the NeSmith Late Model race at Magnolia Motor Speedway, he would have said, “Horribly.”
Coming off a 15th-place finish last week, the 20-year-old Meridian native entered the $2,000-to-win race with one top-five finish this season.
But Saturday, there was no trace off the bad luck that has followed him this year. Thrash was flawless through qualifying and the feature, starting on the poll and leading every lap of the feature to clinch his first win.
“We’ve been working hard, doing a lot of work on the car,” Thrash said. “I owe this win to a lot of people: my mom and dad, McDevitt Enterprises, the Eaton Clinic. Without them, I couldn’t do any of this.”
Thrash staved off a challenge from Jeremy Shaw and Bryant Marsh, who finished third and second, respectively, but was rarely threatened. Marsh and Shaw appeared to have an opening when Thrash caught lap traffic after 10 laps, but Thrash trailed Steven Jones — the last car on the lead lap — for nearly five laps without Shaw or Marsh gaining any ground.
“We were all kind of on the same playing field with the track rubbered up,” Thrash said. “The lap traffic was running about the same speed as we were, so it wasn’t holding me up too bad. I couldn’t really run the line I wanted to, but a couple of them moved out of the way and let me get by, and that helped me. If we moved up, I would have been passed.”
Getting out of the best line, which proved to be the only line, was a gamble for drivers. The track slicked up early in the night, and track officials watered the cushion and the top quarter near the wall prior to the start of the Super Late Model race, which preceded the NeSmith Late Model race. Drivers in the Super Late Model race used multiple lines, as Chad McCool, who finished eighth, ran the last 10 laps of the race along the walls in all four turns. But the grip wasn’t there for NeSmith Late Model drivers in their feature, which forced drivers into a single-file line around the bottom of the track.
“Even if you are a little bit faster, you gotta wait until somebody moves out of the way when it’s rubbered up like it was,” Shaw said. “I felt like we were good enough to run second. When we got in lap traffic early, I felt like my only chance to pass him was to try the top one time, and there just wasn’t anything left up there.”
The race featured one caution on the 22nd lap, but it didn’t provide any opportunities for Shaw and Marsh to get Thrash on a re-start.
“I really thought there’d be more cautions than that,” said Marsh, 15, of Corinth. “At that point, it really didn’t help us that that caution came up. We were coming pretty good before that caution came out. I think it hurt us. We had the heat built up in our tires, and that caution kind of killed us.”
For Shaw, tire temperature became an issue late in the race, and the caution flag helped him.
“I blistered my tires there on that long run,” Shaw said, “and under caution, I rolled around the infield under the caution in a little bit of mud to try and cool them off, maybe get them to fire again on the restart, but with three laps left, there really wasn’t enough time.”
Daniel Bridgman and Jamey Boland rounded out the top five.
In other race action, Ronnie Lee Hollingsworth won the Super Late Model feature. Dallas Cooper, Jamie Pickard, Tony Shelton, and Buddy George rounded out the top five. Lee Ray won the Street Stock feature. Jay Burchfield, TK King, Chase Washington, and Spencer Hughes rounded out the top five. Jason Byrd won the Factory Stock feature. Jennifer Byrd, Brad Gable, John Johnson, and Josh Lawley rounded out the top five.
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