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Southern Super Series

Stephen Nasse Claims Southern Super Series Victory at Watermelon Capital

Speed51.com Photo

(This recap originally appeared on Speed51.com and is used by the Southern Super Series official website)

While Bubba Pollard’s winning streak in the Southern Super Series came to a surprising halt after just 30 laps at Crisp Motorsports Park (GA) Saturday night, it was another familiar face in victory lane.

Stephen Nasse scored his second Southern Super Series win of the season, dominating the Georgia Summer Nationals. The Pinellas Park, Florida driver took the lead from Scotty Ellis on lap 52 of the 125-lap feature and led the rest of the way. In addition to the $5,000 winner’s check, Nasse also collected the $5,000 “Double Down at the Next Town” bonus after competing in the last SSS event at Five Flags on July 31.

At the end, Nasse’s margin of victory was 4.6 seconds over Connor Okrzesik.  Nasse couldn’t help but wonder if bad luck would also come his way, but on this night nothing was stopping him.

“Yesterday and today, I felt like we had the best car,” Nasse told the Southern Super Series website.  “I was just waiting for something to go wrong.  It’s just my luck for something to happen to us. Fortunately, it was a smooth night.

“I was able to maintain a really fast pace that they weren’t able to keep up with.  We’re very fortunate tonight.  We said we were going to go on a tear and win lots of races. We’re doing that.  We’ve been in contention everywhere we go.”

Pollard led the first 21 laps of the race, but came to pit road with what he thought was a battery issue under caution.  He would come to a stop less than 10 laps later on track, unable to finish the race.

“At the start of the race, we were just riding,” Pollard explained.  “We had a good car, a car capable of winning the race tonight.  I thought it was the battery, the car just started missing.  It kept getting worse.  We got lucky there and got a caution, but before I could come in to pit it had already shut off on us.

“We swapped ignition boxes and that didn’t fix it.  It ended up being the distributor went out.  That’s part of racing.  I hate it. We had a good car and could have won the race.  It is what it is, and we’ll go on to the next one.”

While Pollard believed he had a car that could win the race, Nasse was convinced he had the car to beat, even without an issue for Pollard.

“It would have been very tough for anyone to keep up with us tonight.  In practice, in the long runs, I think our car really excelled everybody for drive off the corner.  At the end of the race, I was only driving about 40 percent and we were able to keep a comfortable tenth on them behind us.

“It would have been a good race.  You never know what’s going to happen with the 26, but, tough s—.”

Connor Okrzesik finished second, pleased to put together a strong run.  While the finish was Okrzesik’s third top-five finish of the Southern Super Series season, it was the first where he felt he and his team performed to potential in 2020.

“We haven’t really had a good year this year.  I think this is our first podium this year.  It’s the first step towards getting us back where we need to be to win some races later this year.”

Jake Garcia completed the podium by finishing third.  The Georgia young gun was pleased to score a strong finish after starting seventh in the field following the top-eight redraw.

“It was a good run. We started out seventh there and slowly made up a few spots each restart.  We ended up third on that last restart and it went green from there.

“We had a good car the whole time.  I think next time we’ll be able to pick up a few spots.”

Scotty Ellis finished fourth, with Hudson Halder rounding out the top five. The Southern Super Series will be back in action on September 19 at Five Flags Speedway (FL) for the Blizzard Series finale. The complete results from Cordele can be found below.

  1. Stephen Nasse
  2. Connor Okrzesik
  3. Jake Garcia
  4. Scotty Ellis
  5. Hudson Halder
  6. Jeremy Pate
  7. Hunter Robbins
  8. Chris Davidson
  9. Daniel Dye
  10. Kyle Plott
  11. Kyle Sieg
  12. Colin Allman
  13. Lance Elliott
  14. Dawson Fletcher
  15. Anthony Sergi
  16. Kyle McCallum
  17. Kyle Bryant
  18. Bubba Pollard
  19. Michael Atwell

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Zach Evans is in his second season covering short track racing, A 2012 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Evans is a proud alumnus of The Daily Tar Heel, the school's award-winning independent student newspaper.

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