King Lights Up Lucas Short Course Racing

Rounds 7 and 8 of the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series made a return visit to the Lucas Oil Motorsports Park at Lake Elsinore, California July 25th and 26th, 2009. This time, most of the racing would take place later in the day under the lights to beat the daytime heat that comes to the Lake Elsinore area in July.

The overall theme for King Shocks’ drivers seemed to be consistency and domination; the lights were not the only thing shinning on the track. King Shocks driver’s Kyle Leduc in his Rockstar, Unlimited 4 and Chad George driving his Montclair Kawasaki, UTV took top honors in both rounds of racing.

Greg George almost doubled up taking the win in round 7 driving his Funco, unlimited buggy, but suffered a rare DNF, (did not finish), when the motor shut off in round 8 after leading most of the race. King Shocks driver Rich Ronco ran consistently up front landing on the podium in third place all weekend and the K&N Chevrolet normally driven by everyone’s favorite Hawaiian, Alan Pflueger was instead piloted by Stuntman and hot shoe Mike Johnson to 2nd place in round 7 and third place in round 8.

King Shocks driver Carl Renezeder has held a virtual lock on the unlimited 4 class this season winning all but one of the previous 6 rounds coming into this weekend. Unfortunately, Carl would experience some breakage that would take him out early in both rounds.  Carl looked like his usual self during Saturday’s round 7 race running a blistering fast lap just a tick over one minute on lap four. On lap 5 he launched so high and far off the big table top jump that he cleared the landing; ripping the trailing arm off on impact. Gremlins would again take their toll in round 8 when Carl went out on lap 10. Fortunately, Carl eluded the dreaded gremlins in Unlimited 2 competition with consistent 2nd place finishes in both rounds.

Rounds 7 and 8 would be the first time racing the Lucas Oil Series in the Unlimited 4 class for Kyle Leduc but he more than made up for lost time taking both rounds over the sidelined Carl Renezeder, his teammate for the weekend Mike Johnson and a hungry Tim Herbst who swapped 2nd and 3rd place on the podium both days. According to Kyle, they had high hopes for the weekend and expected to run up front with Carl. “It was nice staying at home and being able to race at night, said Kyle, I was able to hit the lake on my Jet-ski during the day and make a real weekend out of it”. “The track’s lighting was awesome but it took some getting used to for the first few laps of racing”.  “Saturday we lead flag to flag but had an oil leak caused by a cracked fitting, we were only one and a half laps from running out of oil when I took the checkers”. “We’ve been real happy with our King shocks, we’re able to make slight tweaks to the valving depending on the size of the jumps or the dirt we are on”. “I’m in the points chase in the TORC series so we are real happy with all our success this season. We will be back at Elsinore this fall for the big money race”.

Kyle certainly made a big splash this weekend along with the other King drivers including John Fitzgerald who won Saturday’s Limited Buggy race and finished second on Sunday and Chad Leising who racked up another podium during Sunday’s Superlight race.