One victory doesn’t necessarily offset an entire year’s worth of frustration, but Harrison Burton made up for much of a difficult 2016 with an early-season victory in Speedfest 200 on Sunday afternoon at Watermelon Capital Speedway in Cordele, Georgia.
The 16-year-old captured the biggest victory of his young career against a stout field of 26 Super Late Models in the annual CRA exhibition race. Not only did the second-generation driver emerge victorious but he did so in dominant fashion. Burton led 161 of the 200 overall laps.
The son of Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series veteran Jeff Burton struggled with reliability last season in both his family owned Super Late Model and the HScott Motorsports No. 12 K&N Pro Series East machine.
That prompted an off-season move to Fury Race Cars and MDM Motorsports respectively. It took just one race for those changes to pay off.
“If you would have told me this in the middle of last year, I would have said ‘nope’ because I probably would have broken or wrecked or something,” Burton said in Victory Lane. “Last year was rough but I knew we were capable of this and being a force in racing.
“Sometimes it’s disappointing but that’s part of racing and its worth it when you have days like this.”
Burton first took the lead on lap 22 and only surrendered the top spot on two different occasions. He was amongst the second group of drivers to pit on Lap 106 but wasted no time getting back to the lead during the following restart.
He lined up fifth but was back in the top spot just two laps later.
“That was awesome,” Burton said. “The guys just kind of washed up in front of me. I took them three-wide, which was probably overaggressive, but I wanted to make sure we beat Erik (Jones) to the front because he’s been fast all weekend.”
Jones was the pole-sitter and led the first 23 laps and would get one more shot at Burton on a Lap 132 restart. Jones led at the line on two different occasions, but couldn’t keep it. Burton took advantage of the bottom line and led for good by Lap 135.
The elder Burton said he learned a lot about his son over the past year, during their collective rough patch.
“As a parent, you live your kids’ triumphs and you live their defeats,” he said. “Last year, think about, we just felt like there was a black stripe over everything we did. It was hard to watch.
“On the other hand, I watched my son to see how he would handle it. Everyone wants to win but I think you really see how much an athlete wants something when he has deal with the downs. I watched my son and he never got down. He would get disappointed, but he’d wake up the next day and he’d be ready to go.”
Jones held off a hard-charging Nasse to finish second. The soon-to-be NASCAR Cup Series rookie admitted he hadn’t raced nor watched Burton race much over the past few seasons. He had been looking forward to racing against Burton and was impressed by what he saw.
“They were just fast all weekend,” Jones said. “I thought they’d win the pole honestly. We were just too tight and you really saw that when we were up top. We just didn’t have the drive off that we needed. But we’ll take second.”
The race was extremely clean and green, especially by Watermelon Capital Speedway standards. There were only four cautions and just one incident worth noting. Spencer Gallagher spun over the Turn 3 hill and ended up in the creek. His Super Late Model was destroyed by slamming into the soaked soil.
Matt Weaver is the owner and founder of Short Track Scene. Weaver grew up in the sport, having raced himself before becoming a reporter in college at the University of South Alabama. He also has extensive experience covering NASCAR, IndyCar and Dirt Sprint Cars.
