John Currie earned his third Everyman Challenge consecutive win today in Johnson Valley, but in spite of the fact that he ran away from most of the field, it didn’t come easy. Brad Lovell challenged Currie for most of the race, although Currie said that he wasn’t aware of Lovell’s presence.
“I didn’t really know that the Lovells were as close as they were, I didn’t know we were really racing,” Currie said at the finish line. “We had actually seen them when we came over the top of Jackhammer. When we looked back we could see a truck coming down, but we thought it was Brandon Heyes or something because they started way up in front.”
Lovell, who was racing in the Legends class where racers were limited to one shock per corner and DOT tires, had started quite a ways back in the field but passed dozens of racers and was the second car on the course by race mile 49. Currie was aware of another vehicle’s presence behind him but tried to just focus on driving.
“You can’t race each other out here,” Currie said. “You have to race the course first and then race each other, so you can’t let it get in your head that I can out-drive the next guy because as soon as you start to do that you start blowing tires off the beads and stuff breaks, so we kind of kept it under control and we had no flats.”
Currie said he really only had one problem today at about race mile 97 when a fan belt failed (which he thinks may have just been a stick catching it). Lovell, who managed to cross the finish line second to earn the Legends class win, was in the hunt for the overall but ran into some trouble during the race.
“We had all kinds of problems out there,” Lovell said. “We were pushing so hard from the start we came out and we started behind all of the Modifieds, so 40 or 50 cars or so. We kept just picking them off. Coming back in after the first lap, I think we were in second.”
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