KNOXVILLE, I.A.- Following Thursday’s prelim night at Knoxville Raceway, all the talk is about NASCAR Cup Series champion and defending Knoxville Nationals winner Kyle Larson.
The man being overlooked is Daryn Pittman.
While Larson won the night’s 25-lap feature and will start from pole for the second year in a row for the Nationals, he doesn’t sit alone at the top of the event standings.
After an outstanding night for Pittman and the No. 69k team, he and Larson both sit with 490 qualifying points (out of a possible 500). Larson earned the tiebreaker, meaning Pittman will start on the outside of the front row for Saturday’s 50-lap, $190,000-to-win main event.
Pittman used an early pill-draw to lay down an absolute flyer in time trials, scoring him the fast time and 200 points in the process. The Oklahoma native wasn’t done there, either. Following an eight car invert, Pittman drove from the eighth starting spot to score the heat race win with a last-lap pass on Landon Crawley, netting him another 100 points.
Those results set up the possibility for Pittman to notch a perfect score, something that hadn’t been done since David Gravel accomplished it in 2017 – the only time it’s happened in the 21st century.
But a perfect night wasn’t meant to be for Pittman. Another eight car invert lined the No. 69k up in eighth for the 25-lap main event. Pittman fell down as far as ninth before charging back to sixth late in the going, just missing out on a top-five.
Nonetheless, a score of 490 left him starting second for Saturday with as good a shot as anyone to take home the biggest race in all of Sprint Car Racing.
“The goal is always to put it in the show,” Pittman told Frontstretch. “There’s obviously teams that come here expecting to win or contend for wins, we hope to, but I think it would be not truthful if we thought we would actually come and contend, or have a shot at starting on the front row. So I’m ecstatic about that, obviously I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little disappointed that we lost the tiebreak and didn’t get the pole.
“But man, front row, we’ve got a great spot, just have to keep working on our car a little bit, I mean its got a lot of speed to race with these guys, Rico [Abreu], [Kyle] Larson and Gio [Scelzi], [Carson] Macedo.”
Like many others, Pittman has noticed a change in the racing…
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