Bright Wins The Battle But Buckwalter Wins The War At Speedweek Finale
8/5/2019: After 5 days of continuous battle (no rainouts either), a crown was finally ready to be given out for the champion of the Hyper Racing 600 Sprint Speedweek Presented By 600cc Performance. Going into the night 8 drivers had a mathematical shot at winning the championship but realistically about 3 drivers were in real contention. As we got to feature time one of those three would be eliminated by missing the A-Main and leaving the final battle between Tim Buckwalter and Damon Paul.
Both drivers would start mid pack and Buckwalter have to make sure to keep Paul within 6 spots to retain his points lead. Out front Alex Bright would shoot into the lead and start to show his dominance. Bright who had lead the Speedweek points until an untimely incident the night before was looking to salvage his week with a 2nd win. As Bright was running away, Paul and Buckwalter worked their way through the field. Paul would get to the front first but Buckwalter was staying within his 6 spot distance. The race approached halfway and Paul worked his way into the 2nd spot and was tracking down Bright. While Paul was getting clean air there was tight racing from 3rd-7th which put a lot of pressure on Tim Buckwalter. The night before Bright got caught up in a mid pack incident and that cost him a shot at the championship. With his experience Buckwalter smoothly made his way into the top 5 as the field started to stretch itself out. With a late caution, Paul would be on Bright’s back bumper but just could not get anything to stick. Bright would end up taking the $1K win, his second of the week, while Paul would be your runner up for the second time this week as well. Third would go to Billy Koch after a trying week of action, 4th would be Buckwalter and 5th would be Jim Radney.
Now that the checkered was out Tim Buckwalter stayed within the 6 spots and would become your 2019 Speedweek champion over Damon Paul. What a great battle that would go down to the very last lap after five nights of racing. In other week long awards, Kyle Spence would not only win the hard charger of the night by going 21st to 6th but he won hard charger of the week. Tonight Chris Graham and I will review Speedweek in totality with a few guests to finally wrap up our Speedweek coverage.