Title-chasers triumph as WoO points stay tight
By Kevin Kovac
World of Outlaws Late Model Series
Darrell Lanigan (29) and Josh Richards (1) battle at Mohawk International Raceway. (Andy Watts)
And then there were two. A three-driver battle for the 2010 World of Outlaws Late Model Series championship appears to have become a mano a mano showdown between Josh Richards and Darrell Lanigan, who separated themselves from Tim McCreadie after a pair of holiday-week events.
Richards, 22, and Lanigan, 40, shared victory laurels — Richards captured the 100-lap Battle At Eastern Door on Sept. 1 at Mohawk International Raceway in Akwesasne, N.Y., and Lanigan won the 50-lap Oil Region Labor Day Classic on Sept. 5 at Tri-City Speedway in Franklin, Pa. — and ended the Northeast swing in a virtual dead-heat for the national tour’s $100,000 title. With just four points races remaining on the schedule, Richards leads Lanigan by a scant two-point margin.
The 36-year-old McCreadie, meanwhile, suffered a crushing DNF on Sunday night at Tri-City. He finished 22nd after retiring on lap 24 because of damage his car sustained in an early-race tangle, leaving him 86 points out of the lead, a deficit that he can only erase if both Richards and Lanigan experience epic bouts with bad luck during the stretch drive.
McCreadie entered Tri-City’s action with his hopes of repeating his 2006 WoO LMS championship flickering but still alive, trailing Richards by 48 points and Lanigan by 40 markers after finishing second in Mohawk’s 100-lapper. But he had nowhere to go on lap two when Robbie Blair and Ron Davies tangled between turns three and four while battling for second; T-Mac slid into the incident and limped to the pit area with a mangled front bumper on his car. He returned but couldn’t get up to speed due to the problematic bumper, a piece of which fell off and cut his right-front tire on lap 24 — five circuits after he was lapped — and forced him to retire.
Richards was also involved in the Blair-Davies accident, but he snuck through the scene without stopping and his car sustained only some left-side cosmetic damage. The near-miss was one of three key moments in the week Richards, who also narrowly avoided a devastating crash during Mohawk’s 100 and pulled off a final-lap pass of Shane Clanton for third at Tri-City to keep himself atop the standings.
The close call at Mohawk — he nearly slid into the turn-three wall when he took evasive action to avoid Clint Smith’s car as a caution flag flew on lap 60 — certainly caused Richards’s title aspirations to flash before his eyes. He had, after all, entered the 100 without the points lead for the first time in 25 races, so a night-ending wreck would have put his championship chase on life-support.
“Luck was definitely on our side,” Richards said after going on to bag a $20,000 triumph at Mohawk that was his long-awaited first-ever in a 100-lap event. “When the caution came out and Clint Smith went to pull off the racetrack, I was about 3 inches from destroying the car. I swerved around him, turned sideways and just barely missed the (wall) opening into (turn) three.
“I really thought we were done right there. I mean, if I was a little bit further into the corner we would’ve needed a new car.”
Alas, Richards survived the scare and shortly thereafter ended his slight slump with a milestone extra-distance victory that, ironically, came in the same state where he won his first career WoO (Aug. 15, 2005 at Lebanon Valley Speedway). He was presented $20,000 in cash from Mohawk co-owners John Lazore and Don Thompson and regained the points lead as well. A few days later at Tri-City he avoided falling into a tie for the top spot with Lanigan when he picked up two critical points with his dramatic final-turn pass of Clanton.
Lanigan shook his head when he was asked after winning at Tri-City about Richards’s last-lap move to preserve the points lead, but he accepted it as just another twist in what promises to be a thrilling struggle for the championship.
“It’s gonna go down to the end — that’s the bottom line,” said Lanigan, who won the title in 2008. “Josh is running good and we’re definitely running good, so we’ll see what we got.”
