Garrett Smithley brought home the victory in the season opener at Talladega Superspeedway for the Interstate Batteries Monday Night Racing Pro Series.
“I will take that over the entire disaster of a season I had last season,” said Smithley of his big season opening win.
“Glad we can race it out. What a relief! I can coast the rest of the season, feels good!”
Smithley will now race for a championship later this season.
New Season, New Faces, Same Action
Some new faces, new track and car combinations, but the same old action. Those phrases describe what the new season of the Interstate Batteries Monday Night Pro Racing Series will be giving us, as it did on Monday night (Nov. 7).
If there are readers and viewers who are new to iRacing or this league, here is the summary of what you should expect. To sum it up, the league features a full field of names involved in the motorsports industry. That can include a driver, a reporter, a spotter, crew member, PR representative, anything along those lines. Some of racing’s biggest names have participated in this league in the past, such as Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kyle Busch and Ty Gibbs, just to name a select few. The league began back in 2020 during the pandemic, and began its sixth season this week.
Some famous names across racing that people might recognize who are new to the league this season include Natalie Decker, Joey Savatgy, Christian Eckes, Zach Osborne and Chase Cabre. All of those drivers listed above made their debuts tonight.
This Week’s Action
The opener took place at Talladega, with the old Cup Series Car of Tomorrow. For reference, on iRacing there are no restrictor plates on these cars, meaning they can exceed 240 miles per hour in the draft. That definitely proved to be difficult for some, but we did see some great action.
Cabre scored the pole in his debut with a time of 41.962, a blistering pace for Talladega, but not unusual for the COT on iRacing as previously mentioned.
As the race began, defending champion Presley Sorah jumped out to the lead over Adam Cabot and Joey Padgett. The flow of the race was quite unpredictable with the handling of these cars. With the high speed, tire wear was a big factor as to who could maintain track position.
David Schildhouse took the lead just beyond lap 10 and kept it up until the first round of pit stops around lap 20. With this car on iRacing, maintaining one huge pack is very difficult because of how hard to drive the COT…
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