Swainsboro Raceway
Putnam's up-and-down season ends with crown
Josh Putnam and his winning team. (Zackary Washington/Simple Moments Photography)
Josh Putnam entered the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series’s season-ending doubleheader at Swainsboro (Ga.) Raceway leading the points standings. After a 15th-place finish in Friday’s 30-lap opener he found himself trailing Joseph Joiner.
And then when the checkered flag fell in Saturday’s 60-lap Southern Showcase finale, the script had flipped again and the 40-year-old driver from Florence, Ala., was back on top thanks to a fifth-place finish that was good enough for him to secure the first-year regional tour’s $20,000 championship prize.
The roller-coaster ride to close the HTF campaign was essentially a microcosm of his path to the title.
“It’s been kind of up-and-down through this thing this year,” Putnam said while celebrating his points crown during Saturday’s postrace ceremonies on Swainsboro’s frontstretch. “It seems like we just … all that good luck or bad luck, I don’t know, when we have bad luck than it seemed like the ones around us had bad luck also. Maybe that was good luck on our side.
“This shows that we can keep it together in the long haul. I know we’ve won just one with this deal this year (a $10,000 score on at Magnolia Motor Speedway in Columbus, Miss.), but we’ve been to a lot of tracks and stuff that we haven’t been to and we’re kind of learning a lot of that stuff.”
Despite his inexperience at many of the ovals visited by the HTF circuit, Putnam flashed solid consistency with eight top-five and 15 top-10 finishes in 18 events. He also showed resiliency, especially over the last weekends of the season.
Following a season-worst 27th-place finish in the opener of the Sept. 29-30 weekend at Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala., Putnam and his team pulled an all-nighter to take the motor out of the Rocket car he drove that night and button it into his other machine. The work paid off with a fourth-place finish in Saturday’s feature that sent him to Swainsboro leading the HTF standings by four points over Milton, Fla.’s Joiner and 30 points over Wil Herrington of Hawkinsville, Ga.
“My whole crew, my dad’s 60-some years old and he was out there with us all night (making the engine change) also,” Putnam said. “It was everybody hands-on. Even Wil (Herrington), those guys helped some. We was all parked there together, and that shows what we race with. We race our asses off together and we don’t cut nobody no slack, but when one’s in need we all chip in.
“For all them (crew) guys, just because I wasn’t happy with a backup car, to pull the motor and dry-sump out of it and put it in this car shows how much they want this too.”
Putnam’s first night at Swainsboro didn’t go according to plan as well with his midpack finish, which allowed Joiner, with a ninth-place run, to grab the points lead by eight markers. Putnam needed to respond in the deciding race and he did, running among the top five throughout the 60-lapper while Joiner struggled, never climbing higher than ninth before pitting to change a tire on lap 57 and finishing 14th.
“We struggled a little bit last night,” said Putnam, who beat Joiner by 10 points in the final standings. “We were just too tight, too tight, and then we come in and Cody (Mallory) came and helped today and, like, he had this thing really good.
“The only reason I think we’re not on that podium there (with a top-three finish) is just me. About halfway I was real cautious there. I really wasn’t driving the car the way I needed to and I figured some stuff out there late and we got a little better, but I kind of wished I’d put a little more out there midways. We was also points racing, too, so I had that in mind.”
Putnam remarked afterward that he had grown weary of “the pressure of these points,” but clinching the championship made it worthwhile.
“But all in all, I think it really shows what your team is, to keep working on this stuff and not give up on me when I tear stuff up, knock the deck out in hot laps and stuff like that,” Putnam said. “They don’t give up on me and that’s what it takes.”
