Joey Throckmorton’s amazing season at South Boston Speedway comes to a close Saturday night. And as he has week-after-week in 2016, he’s approaching the finale in methodical style.
“All of the wins, we worked hard for them. We continued to work every week the same, no matter what the points looked like. That’s what we’re doing this week,” Throckmorton said headed into Saturday night’s GCR presents Spaulding Equipment race night at South Boston Speedway. “We’ll just keep the same mind set and keep going.”
That steady, hard-working approach has paid amazing dividends for Throckmorton and his Limited Sportsman team. He has won 10 times this season, tying the track record set by Bruce Anderson in 2006. He has already wrapped up the division’s point championship. About the only thing left for him to accomplish in 2016 is to claim the Limited single-season win record.
“This weekend, with the points locked up, everything is sort of over and done. A win would be nice, but everything else will be icing (on the cake),” he said.
“Obviously we’re going in trying to win, but if we don’t, we don’t. We don’t want to be greedy. We’ll take what we can get. We’ve had an outstanding year.”
Many times drivers point to the bad luck they’ve had during a season. Throckmorton points to the good luck that he has enjoyed along the way.
“I told a guy from the newspaper that I would have never bet on winning this many races coming into the season,” said Throckmorton. “The amount of luck we’ve had has been amazing. We’ve had problems in practice and overcome them and we’ve had races where things happened and we overcame it.
“The July first race was one of them. We pretty much had it won and had a fuel pump problem, but we were able to finish third; we could have easily finished last. Another race we spun out and still finished third or fourth. In a normal season for me I would have finished eighth or ninth or something like that. Everything just fell into place this season.”
While Throckmorton has locked up the Limited Sportsman track championship, others will be on the line headed into Saturday’s final race night of the year.
Matt Bowling has a solid lead in the Late Model Stock Division behind eight wins, but will be looking over his shoulder for Peyton Sellers, who still has a shot at the title. Bowling is also leading the NASCAR Whelen All-American National Championship race, tightening his grip with two road victories last weekend.
Johnny Layne has a solid lead in the Budweiser Pure Stock division, needing just to start the race to sew up the championship.
There’s a close battle in the Budweiser Hornets championship chase with Kenny Mills holding a narrow, 391-388 lead over Todd Garnett with Justin Dawson within striking distance in third with 359.
The powerful NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour will also be in action Saturday night with a 150-lap championship race. George Brunnhoelzl III won back in the spring when the Modifieds made their first South Boston stop of 2016.
The lineup for Saturday night includes Late Model twin 75-lap races, a 50-lap Limited, a 30-lap Budweiser Pure Stock race and a 15-lap Budweiser Hornet race along with the 150-lap Modified event.
