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Sunday, June 29, 2008

Morris breaks own record

The driver takes the lead on a restart to win his sixth race in a row and better his old mark by one.

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RADFORD -- Another week, another Philip Morris win.

He took the green and white checkered flag in the Landmark Builders/Dublin Developers/WDBJ7 150 for his sixth win in a row, setting a Motor Mile record for consecutive victories since the current ownership took over the track in 2004, breaking his old record of five.

While a Morris victory wasn't a surprise, the fact that he trailed for most of the race was.

Forrest Reynolds built upon his two second-place finishes from last week with a third straight runner-up finish on Saturday and led 81 laps before conceding the lead to Morris after a red flag on lap 99 stopped the field.

Morris took the lead on lap 111 after the restart on 109.

"That long red flag, the tires had a chance to cool off and just kind of screwed things up," said Reynolds. "Got to lead some laps, have some fun. Got to race hard, didn't tear up anything."

Soon, racing hard may translate into victories for Reynolds who seems to improve every week.

"If the [race] stays green we probably would have won that thing," he said. "We're getting closer and closer."

The red flag came after Derrick Lancaster hit the back wall on lap 99. The two-time Limited Sportsman champion was in the middle of his best run of the season, in fourth place, and pressing for third before something went wrong and the car hit the wall. Lancaster walked away from the accident but his car couldn't finish the race.

In third place was Tommy Lemons Jr. to seal his best finish of the year.

"We've just been struggling all year," he said. "[We're] finally starting to figure it out. Maybe [in the] next few weeks we'll be up there running [with Morris]."

Owen Kelly finished in fourth place and Zeke Shell took fifth.

Kelly Kingery seemed to have some problems early and often but held on for a seventh-place finish.

"It was just a total struggle from lap five on," he said. "It was really bad."

In the Limited Sportsman race, Caleb Holman sat in fourth place and watched as all three cars in front of him took each other out on the front stretch of lap 47, leaving Holman to take the win three laps later.

Holman survived two red flags, quite a few yellows and a whole lot of carnage to drive away with the win in a race that looked more like a demolition derby at times as half of the 24 original cars finished the race.

Tony Rogers finished in second place and Terry Lawson took third.

Adam Phillips won the Ucar race. Scooter Hollandsworth finished in second and Darryl Hamlin ended up in third place.

The Mod-4 division ran two races with Wayne Corprew winning the first, followed by Joe Taylor in second and Bryan Reedy in third.

The second Mod-4 race was not finished by press time.

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