SPRING VALLEY, Minn. – Terry Phillips scored his second Featherlite Fall Jamboree win of the weekend Sunday at the Deer Creek Speedway, besting a stellar field of USMTS Modifieds in the preliminary event which was postponed from Thursday due to rain and flooding in Southeastern Minnesota.
The 44-year-old from Springfield, Mo., wrestled the lead away from race-long leader Ryan Gustin on lap 18 and held him off the remaining 12 laps to secure the $3,000 winner’s share of the prize money.
Gustin grabbed the lead at the drop of the green flag from polesitter Al Hejna and built a sizeable advantage over the field over the first dozen laps, but thick lapped traffic allowed Phillips to close the gap in a hurry.
The pair raced side by side for four straight laps with Phillips edging in front at the end of lap 17. One lap later, the race’s first caution waved with Phillips in charge.
Despite pressure from Gustin over the final stretch, Phillips was able to hold off the winningest USMTS Casey’s General Stores National Tour driver of 2010 to earn a bit of redemption after last year’s disappointing loss in the final 100 feet of the Saturday night finale.
“We like this place a lot and the fans here are something else,” said Phillips in victory lane. “To be quite honest, I think we had a better car last year when we got beat at the end there, but we can’t complain – we were good enough tonight.”
It was the second checkered flag of the week for Phillips who also won Friday night’s 40-lap preliminary feature and the first time that one driver has won two main events in the same weekend during the Featherlite Fall Jamboree.
For Gustin, it was a solid runner-up finish but left him hungry for his first Featherlite Fall Jamboree victory.
Phillips’ teammate Jeremy Payne took third after a hard-fought battle with Jason Hughes and Kelly Shryock, with Shryock getting past Hughes on the final lap to finish fourth.
Rodney Sanders came from 15th on the 30-car starting grid to finish sixth, Stormy Scott claimed the seventh spot and John Anderson did the most passing in the WIX Filters “A” Main, finishing eighth after starting 22nd. Tommy Weder Jr. and Shane Hebert rounded out the top-10 finishers.
Phillips took home $9,300 for his efforts over three days, but the biggest chunk of the prize money went south to Westville, Okla., with Jason Hughes.
Including his 2010 USMTS National Championship which he clinched the moment he pulled onto the track for his heat race, Hughes left with $21,200 in his pocket.
En route to claiming his first-ever USMTS National Championship, Hughes put together a model campaign of consistency and reliability. In 18 starts during the Hunt for the USMTS Casey’s General Stores National Championship, he never failed to finish a race and racked up 2 wins, 16 top-fives and 17 top-ten finishes.
Gustin wound up second in the final standings for the second straight year while Tommy Myer finished third, Zack VanderBeek wound up fourth and Shryock claimed fifth. Sanders, Jon Tesch, Dereck Ramirez, Jason Krohn and Tim Donlinger completed the top-10 in the final USMTS National Championship standings.
Prior to Sunday’s finale, the annual Non-Qualifiers Race was staged with a field of 30 cars and drivers that would rival most main event line-ups in the country.
In the end, Bumper Jones of Mesilla Park, N.M., rolled his #111 GRT Modified into victory lane by holding off Donlinger over the course of the 25-lapper to claim the $2,000 paycheck.
“The fans up here are great – it seems like I have more fans in Minnesota than I do back at home and I really appreciate everybody's support,” Jones said after his win. “Any win at Deer Creek is big. We were here earlier this year for a weekly race and even that's a hard show to make.
“Any win here is a big one. I rank this right up there with all the others.”
The event is normally held prior to the Saturday night main event, but was moved to Sunday this year when Thursday’s show was postponed. The race features the top 30 qualifiers that competed all three days of the Featherlite Fall Jamboree, but failed to make it into the third and final feature event of the weekend.
In a nail-biter that came down to the final lap of the 2010 campaign, Mullins Race Engines emerged as the season’s COMP Cams Engine Builder of the Year. With Gustin’s runner-up finish in the main event, the Mt. Olive, Ill., engine shop won the award by a single point over reigning champion Sput’s Racing Engines of Owatonna, Minn.
Already clinched prior to Sunday’s race, Johnny Scott captured the 2010 DandyLand Farms Rookie of the Year Award and Hughes Racing Chassis won the 2010 Chassis Builders Championship.
By earning the most passing points on Saturday, Donlinger claimed the season-long AFCO Pole Award, while several other drivers shared in thousands of dollars in point fund money and contingency awards.
