After Mother Nature postponed the Racing for Wildlife 200 at Michigan International Speedway to Saturday morning, sophomore ARCA RE/MAX Series driver Patrick Sheltra answered the delay with an impressive top-10 in Saturday morning’s event.
Sheltra, who qualified 19th on Thursday afternoon bounced back from a faulty spark plug wire in the early stages of the Racing for Wildlife 200 to blossom from 25th to record a stout sixth place run in his third run at the Brooklyn, Michigan facility.
Sheltra’s sixth place run nets the Whitesville, Kentucky based Sheltra Motorsports their fifth top-10 finish of the season and ties Sheltra’s previous best season-record in the ARCA RE/MAX Series. In 2007, in his inaugural year of competition, Sheltra amassed two top-fives and five top-10 efforts during the course of his freshman campaign.
This morning’s finish was a Michigan personal best for the 22-year old Sheltra. In last year’s ARCA event, Sheltra finished 14th.
“We’re very happy with our performance today,” said Sheltra. “We overcame a spark plug wire issue at the start of the event and maneuvered back to the front. We thought we would challenge for the win but our car was plowing real bad at the end of the race. We’re back on track and we’ll get us a win here soon.”
Sheltra, who heads to Indiana for a series of UMP dirt racing before heading to Canada next week is expected to climb in the ARCA RE/MAX Series point standings putting his championship chase back in gear following Saturday’s event.
Exiting Michigan, Sheltra has 34 ARCA RE/MAX Series starts to his credit with a career best finish of second at Toledo Speedway (May 2008) with two additional top-five finishes (third) at Illinois State Fairgrounds (August 2007), (fourth) at Berlin Raceway (July 2007) while holding additional top-10s at Michigan International Speedway (June 2008), Kentucky Speedway (May 2008), Kansas Speedway (April 2008), Iowa Speedway (April 2008), Kentucky Speedway (June 2007), DuQuoin State Fairgrounds (September 2007) and Toledo Speedway (October 2007). An eighth place qualifying effort at Kansas Speedway (April 2008) is Sheltra’s best time trials efforts to date. He has controlled the ARCA field once for four laps.
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