Staff
It was the race Steve Arpin wanted to be in. It wasn’t the result he wanted to have.
The Fort Frances product, representing the OMSE2 team, made it into the feature of the Global Rallycross Championship tour stop at the Atlanta Motor Speedway on Saturday.
But Arpin never made it past the first lap of the final showdown, with Toomas Heikkinen of the OlsbergsMSE squad going on to win the event.
Arpin, who now calls Asheville, N.C., his home, did earn enough points in qualifying for the feature to move into ninth place in the GRC driver standings with 58 points.
That puts him one point back of eighth-place Liam Doran of LD Motorsports.
Heikkinen leads the standings handily with 139 points, well ahead of teammates Tanner Foust (96) and Brian Deegan (84) in second and third, respectively.
While the racing portion of the day didn’t go as planned, Arpin did make his mark on two fronts in terms of media coverage.
First, he had a full-length interview with Kaedy Kiely of Atlanta classic rock station 97.1 The River last week prior to the event. The entire interview can be downloaded from ww.971theriver.com
Then Arpin teamed with Foust to visit the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta facility on Friday to share some time with the young patrons of the building who are battling a variety of debilitating physical ailments.
A video feature of the visit serves as the latest episode of GRC TV, which can be found at www.global-rallycross.com/news
The next race on the GRC tour takes place in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 22, with the event scheduled to be broadcast on ABC at 3:30 p.m. CT.
