Lucas Punkari
For Chuck Lambert and Christopher Leek, Saturday’s 20-lap feature in the WISSOTA Midwest Modified division at the Emo Speedway was a case of déja vu.
Three weeks after the pair duelled for the checkered flag in the main event, both drivers went at it once again for the lead over the final laps, with Lambert once again coming out on top.
“I guess I had a pretty good lead there from what everyone was telling me,” Lambert said following his division-best third feature win of the season.
“But when the caution flag came out about halfway through, that bunched everyone back up,” he noted.
“I saw him [Leek] once and I felt him there, and that was the last I saw of him, so it worked out.”
After finishing first in the heat earlier in the evening, Lambert moved his way into the lead on the first lap of the feature race as he blew past pole-sitter Ken Perry shortly after the green flag flew.
“Ken’s always tough to get by,” Lambert stressed.
“Once I got him figured out, and knew where he was going to push going into the corner, I cut the car down to the inside and away we went,” he added.
Lambert seemingly was in cruise control during the first half of the race as he pulled out to a big lead. But when Dwayne Pihulak and Anthony Visser tangled in Turn #1 to bring out the caution flag, that allowed Leek to close right in and set the stage for their duel to the finish.
“It was a good race and we had a lot of fun,” enthused Leek, who leads the division by 49 points over Cody Ossachuk.
“I think I could have got him a couple of times, but we are pleased with getting a second-place finish, especially after we blew the transmission before hot laps and missed the heat race while we fixed that up,” he reasoned.
Perry took third place, which easily was his best finish of the season in a feature.
In the Street Stocks, Chris Shine nabbed his first feature victory of the year, and his first since returning to the track after a couple of years’ absence, as he benefited from the misfortune of leader Jeff Wickstrom near the halfway point of the race.
Wickstrom, who had won the heat earlier, had recovered from an early-race spin in Turn #4 and had worked his way past Shine for the lead when he had to pull into the pits with mechanical problems.
“I was losing the power steering after the spin, and when that was going away, it was starting to heat things up under the hood,” Wickstrom explained.
“Once it started to overheat, I had to pull it off.
“But I pushed it for as long as I could, though,” he stressed.
That put Shine back into the lead, where he would pull away from Richard Visser and Wes Morriseau over the final laps to take a comfortable victory.
“I was just trying to keep up with Jeff there and when he pulled off, I was happy about that,” Shine smiled.
“The car was running good there late in the race as I was leading, so I was just making sure that I didn’t screw things up,” he reasoned.
And in the WISSOTA Modified division, Gavin Paull earned his seventh feature win of the season in a race that wasn’t as close for him as his triumph a week earlier when he passed Steve Nordin with just a couple of laps to go.
“We did a little bit of work this week because it was too close there last week,” noted Paull, who is 19 points behind Denny Trimble for the division lead.
“We got the car working good, though, as it was fast in the heat race that we won, and we just carried that over into the feature,” he explained.
After a couple of cautions in the early stages of the race, Paull worked his away around Dwayne Pelepetz on a restart to take over top spot—and held off the field the rest of the way.
“He [Pelepetz] was pretty fast and he was kind of searching for the line at that point,” Paull recalled.
“I had made a three-wide pass before one of the cautions came out and I thought that the bottom would be the preferred line, and I was able to use that to take the lead,” he said.
Glen Strachan finished in second while Heat #2 winner Aaron Holton took third place.
With another feature win in his back pocket, Paull now is getting ready to head to the Red River Co-Op Speedway in Winnipeg tomorrow night in a tune-up for the $5,000 Al Delaine Memorial event Aug. 9.
“I’m hoping to get a top-five finish at that event,” Paull said.
“The track there is a little bit bigger and faster than here [Emo], but it has the same kind of banking and there is going to be a lot of good cars there.
“There is probably going to be between 40 and 50 cars that night, so I will have to be at the top of my game,” he stressed.
Action at Emo, meanwhile, will resume this Saturday (weather permitting), with hot laps at 7 p.m. and the first race at 7:30.
