In the end, it was Shaun Ross's race to celebrate.
He came all the way from the Okanagan to pick up his first WESCAR career main event win at the Mr. Quick/White Spruce Enterprises 100 and he led it from start to finish.
But hometown driver Logan Jewell and his crew did not leave empty-handed. Racing Sunday at PGARA Speedway for the one and only Prince George stop on the WESCAR calendar, Jewell set a new track record, moved up from the back of the pack to finish second in the 100-lap feature race and claimed the lion's share of the points to take over the WESCAR series points lead.
For Ross, in his second season racing in WESCAR, the climb to the top of the podium has been a rapid ascent. The 33-year-old made the jump to WESCAR last year, while also racing street stocks at Penticton Speedway. The year before that, he was racing in the entry-level hornet class.
"I was pretty nervous, I didn't know if I would be able to hold off (Jewell), he was pretty fast, but I had my spotter, Tim, in my ear calming me down and it was pretty exciting," said Ross. "Harding Motorsports prepared a very fast car and my crew was great.
"These cars are easier to drive than my hornet car – I like it," he said.
Jewell started the feature race in the back of a 13-car field and hung in the middle of the pack until he started moving up on the leaders at Lap 32. While Trevor Adelman of Quesnel kept right on Ross's tail in second place, Jewell starting picking off positions, and by Lap 60 he was a half-lap off Ross's pace. Ryley Seibert spun on Lap 71, bringing out the first caution flag, and that tightened up the field considerably, with Jewell up to fourth place, and by the time he got past Dave Olson for second place he was three seconds behind Ross with 15 laps left.
Jewell cut the gap to two seconds with five laps left when Wes Mader got involved with Chris Babcock and spun the Fort St. John driver in Corner 4, resulting in the second caution of the race. All of a sudden, Ross had Jewell casting a large shadow in his rear view mirror for the single-file restart.
The green flag dropped and Jewell tried ducking down on the inside but Ross shut him down. Jewell made an attempt on the outside lane but the leader from Kelowna was having no part of that and held on for the checkered flag ahead of Jewell and third-place Olson of Quesnel.
"I gave it all I had for the last lap, figured I'd try the outside, but it just wasn't sticking," said Jewell.
"The cautions sure helped, that got me up to second and I probably should have won this one but we'll take it."
Olson, 28, grew up in Hixon but considers Prince George his home track and he held on to third place for almost the entire race.
"I was trying to save the tires for the end there, because we usually run them off in the beginning," said Olson. "Logan had the car to beat and he was bumping on the door and got us and we were hopefully going to follow him around (Ross) and come second but it just didn't quite work."
Prince George drivers Bob Williams and Sheldon Mayert were fifth and sixth respectively.
Jewell, 26, was third in the season-opener two weeks ago in Williams Lake and with WESCAR series leader Korbin Thomas unable to make the trip from his home in White Rock, Jewell didn't waste his opportunity to become the series points leader. It started when he set the new track record in qualifying Sunday morning, clocking 16.484 seconds on the three-eighths mile track to break the former record of 16.521, set by Thomas in 2013.
"We qualified fast, big points for us in the championship picture," said Jewell. "We're going to keep this momentum going and we're going to win this championship this year.
"My crew did a great job today, we broke the track record and couldn't do it without them. My dad spends hours in the shop studying this car, going over everything to the last millimetre and if it's not good enough he changes it to make it better."
Mark Jewell was a proud papa in the pits after the race – elated with his son's performance Sunday. Sponsored by McCarthy Motors in Terrace, the team had some hard luck with accidents and mechanical troubles over the years competing in the province's top stock car series and they've never led the points race until now.
"Prince George is our home track and it's so hard to win in this series, but we put a lot of hours into the car and he puts a lot of time behind the wheel and we're at top of the heap right now with the car working good," said the 56-year-old Jewell. "It's taken a lot of time to get here and that track record is huge for us. It's a nice pat on the back."
Dave Haworth of Winfield won the WESCAR A-heat, while Mader of Pitt Meadows was the B-heat winner.
Rain postponed all but the warm-up races Saturday and the meet resumed Sunday afternoon. The racing action was delayed another hour as a result of a wreck in the Prince George Auto Racing Association hornet series main event. With one lap to go in the 15-lap feature, race leader Spencer Forseth got punched into the wall from behind by Nathan Christianson. Andrew Oviatt was unable to avoid Foreseth's stalled car and nailed the wall hard, leaving Oviatt pinned in the vehicle. Firefighters were called to the scene and needed the jaws of life to free Oviatt from the wreck. He escaped serious injury.
In other PGARA series results, Terry Braman won the 15-lap Chieftain Auto Parts mini stock main event and Lyall McComber held off a hard-charging Wayne French to capture the Canadian Tire street stock 20-lap main.
