MODIFIED STREET
Despite qualifying his Fox-bodied Mustang number one and going to the final in Modified Street, Brian Murphy said he’d battled engine troubles all weekend. “We tore up some cylinder heads and put new ones on, but I don’t think they’re quite as good as what we had, so we lost about a tenth and three miles an hour,” he explained. In the final round, Ryan Rakestraw took a slight advantage off the start, but according to Murphy that was all he needed. “We couldn’t get the car to 60-foot all day today. I knew we were down on power, so there was no way we were going to pull around him,” he conceded. “He’s probably running the best he’s run all year and we were running our worst all year, so it was a no-brainer. If we didn’t get out on him, we weren’t going to beat him.”
The last time Ryan Rakestraw was in a Modified Street Race at Huntsville it was his first time in Scott Taylor’s ’67 Chevy II and he qualified 7th and redlighted in round two. This time around the rookie matched his qualifying effort, but the end result was much better. After coming out on top of the twice-postponed Carolina final against Richard Reagan on Saturday, Rakestraw repeated on Sunday, going all the way to defeat Brian Murphy stripe-to-stripe in the final round. “I don’t know how we did it; a little bit of luck, a little bit of skill, I guess. More luck than skill, probably,” Rakestraw said. “They always tell me to look straight, not to pay attention to the guy in the other lane, but I can’t help it, I was looking right, straight, right, straight. At 330 feet it looked pretty close, but that’s where I think he had some trouble and I pulled away from him.”
ADVERTISEMENT
