By Gary Thomas
Tulare, CA – April 14, 2010…Returning to the Groppetti Automotive Thunderbowl Raceway for the second time this year West Linn, Oregon’s Zach Zimmerly was able to help use his experience from the previous visit and raced to a seventh place finish in the feature, during what was the third round of action for the traveling Golden State Challenge 410 Sprint Car Series.
Zimmerly in early March brought home a 14th place finish in the main event on the second night of the World of Outlaws double-header at the track and the seventh place effort this past Saturday marked his career best Golden State Challenge result. “It was a nice run for us tonight and I’ve felt really comfortable in the car the last couple weeks,” Zimmerly said. “The track was certainly tricky with how slick it got, but it was a lot of fun to race right up next to the wall and I felt we could have even finished a little higher, but we’ll take a seventh.”
A beautiful sunny day greeted competitors to the Tulare County Fairgrounds oval for the Chris & Brian Faria Memorial, an event put on to honor a pair of brothers’, who were cousins’ to track promoter Steve Faria and lost their lives in separate accidents. With the top-eight qualifiers being eligible for the dash in the GSC format it puts heavy premise on qualifying and Zimmerly proceeded to cut the eighth quickest lap of the night aboard the Mcmillen Motorsports, Level One Concrete, Fire-Down Graphics No. 94, which just beat out former King of California’s Jason Statler and Brent Kaeding.
The 15-year-old then scored a third place finish in his heat race to put him in the dash for the first time this season, where he would draw the number five pill and put him alongside fellow youngster Kyle Larson. With the track getting much drier by the time the dash took to the 1/3 mile clay oval Zimmerly finessed the car to a sixth place finish in the contest to give him a third row starting spot in the main event. Following a pair of features for other classes the surface had become extremely slick when the 410’s hit the speedway, which made for some challenging conditions as the place to be was right up next to the wall.
With the hard-packed surface it made for some of the best racing seen so far this season and despite catching the wall a couple of times, Zimmerly was able to harness the car back down and cross under the checkered in seventh after 30-laps of racing behind the wheel of the Miller&Zimmerly Associates, Douglas Wheel Technologies, Christian Stover Foundation No. 94 A.R.T. “The cushion got pretty rough up there in places as the race went on so it made it tough to run smoothly, but it was good experience to race on a track like this,” commented Zimmerly. “Duke and Scott Mcmillen and my guys had the car fast again and I’m getting more confident each week racing with the different drivers out here.”
Zimmerly and the Mcmillen Motorsports team will now head for two night’s of racing this weekend, beginning on Friday with the opening Feather Falls Casino/Riebes Auto Parts 410 point race at the quarter-mile bullring.
Then on Saturday the West Linn, Oregon driver will be in action with the Golden State Challenge Series at the Petaluma Speedway 3/8 mile clay oval. He currently ranks seventh in the GSC standings and is just 10-digits out of the top-five going into the track he won his very first sprint car race at. “I’m looking forward to going back to Petaluma this weekend,” said Zimmerly, who held off the charges of four-time Civil War champ Andy Forsberg through heavy traffic to claim the victory with the Civil War 360 Series last September. “We’ve been really fast the last couple Saturday’s and are definitely excited to head back to a track we’ve won at before, so hopefully we can finish even higher up in the order this week.”
For information, news, pictures and more on young Zach Zimmerly log onto http://www.zachzimmerly.com