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Brandon Wimmer – FAST Company!
(Bill W) April 27, 2009 – For Brandon Wimmer it was another weekend to get
ready for a stretch of races with the All Star Circuit of Champions. The
Fairmount, Indiana driver registered a 14th and 10th place finish at the
opening weekend of FAST (Fremont/Attica Sprint Title) racing in Ohio last
weekend. This weekend he and owner Rick Ferkel will tow the #0 to All Star
shows at Williams Grove and Lincoln in central Pennsylvania.
Brandon is still relatively inexperienced at Attica Raceway Park and Fremont
Speedway. “There are a lot of decent racecars at these local shows,” he
says. “You include the All Stars and it’s about as tough as it can get
running anywhere. The local guys that run Attica and Fremont every single
week really know these tracks.”
Brandon held his own in the heat race at Attica on Friday. “We actually felt
good in the heat race,” he says. “We started third and stayed there, but we
were racing with (Chad) Kemenah a lot of the way.”
He qualified for the draw, but that’s where his luck stopped. “The Attica
deal is a little tougher because they draw pills (for the heats),” he says.
“You have to make the top three just to redraw for the feature. We were able
to get through the heat, but with twelve numbers in there, you need to draw
a good number, and we didn’t.”
Brandon drew a ten. Starting outside row five, he struggled to a fourteenth
place finish. “We just weren’t good in the feature,” he says. “The car was
really loose. The track basically had zero grip with the way the wind was
howling out there last weekend. If you’re off a little bit at Attica, it
really shows. We ran the first heat and with all the classes they run, we
were off the track for three or four hours. That makes it a bit of a
guessing game by the time you get back out there, because it has changed so
much.”
Things went better at Fremont on Saturday, where Brandon qualified 17th in
the 34-car field despite coming out late. “We went out late in qualifying,
and the track was going away quick, so we weren’t too disappointed with were
we timed,” he says. “It seems like some of the good drivers are getting the
luck of the draw right now too!”
The effort put him up front in a heat that he ran away with for the second
week in a row. Things continued to jell in the main event where he started
fourteenth and finished tenth. “It was good to win the heat again,” he says.
“We were going really well in the feature. We were up around seventh or
eighth at one time. I was running the high side of three and four and got
over the cushion. I lost several spots there, so to come back with a top ten
was good considering.”
The All Star weekends in central Pennsylvania are the toughest on the tour.
Brandon, who last competed at Williams Grove in 2005 and qualified for the
National Open finale, knows that. “A lot will come down to one lap of
qualifying at Williams Grove (Friday),” he says. “I’m sure we’ll have more
than enough cars that we’ll just get one lap on the clock. You can make or
break your night with that lap.”
Saturday the series heads to the Pigeon Hills and the Lincoln Speedway. “I’m
really looking forward to getting to Lincoln,” says Brandon. “I’ve never
been there. Right now, a track Lincoln’s size may agree with us a lot more
than a big half-mile.”
Brandon and Rick Ferkel would like to thank the following sponsors for all
their help: Shorty’s Truck Repair, Smith’s Farm, Goodyear Tires, Griff’s
Engines, Kear’s Speed Shop, Huggins Cams, BRODIX Heads, Barnes Oil Pumps,
Prism Lubricants, Zeis Land Development, Butlerbuilt, Simpson, Winning with
Wellness and WRT Web Designs.
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