Photo Credit: Ashley McCubbin
After going through a season filled with highs and lows, J.R. Fitzpatrick completed his season with a trip to victory lane in the final race of the season, the Autumn Colours Classic at Peterborough Speedway. For Fitzpatrick, it marked his second win of the season.
“It’s a good day,” he said. “I’m excited and glad that we won.”
The Cambridge, Ontario native entered the weekend with confidence after dominating the event at Peterborough Speedway last month, putting almost the whole field a lap down in the process.
“The car has obviously been pretty quick lately and I knew Saturday that the track would be different today,” Fitzpatrick commented after the win on Sunday. “We didn’t really mess with it much because I was worried if it we went too far.”
Starting from the second spot virtue of finishing second in the Chase for the Colours, Fitzpatrick would run solidly in second behind Kevin Cornelius. The pair would then get into lap traffic just past the halfway mark, in which Fitzpatrick would make his move then to get by for the lead.
“When we got out front, Kevin was pulling us a little but I knew once he burnt his rubber up, we would be right there with him,” Fitzpatrick said. “Sure enough at lap 30 we were all over him and passed him.”
The driver of the No. 84 Meineke Car Care, Transaxle Heavy Truck & Trailer Parts, Cambridge Rigging, Equipment Express, Jenco Equipment, Bert, McColl Racing Enterprises, Creative Edge Signs, Wix Filters, Permatex, Driven Steering Wheels, Spray Nine, Deon Racecars, Clayton Johns Media and ImageFactor.ca Motorsport Designs SLM would then lead the rest of the way to the checkered flag, holding off Shawn Chenoweth on a final restart with five laps to go.
With two wins and six top-five finishes on the season, Fitzpatrick finished his first full season on the Dickies OSCAAR Outlaws Presented by London Recreational Racing tour with a second place finish in points.
“It was good,” he said of his season. “If we didn’t have those three failures at the beginning of the year, it would’ve been a hunt for the championship for sure. Those three DNFs really hurt me.”
In the first race of the season at Sunset Speedway, he would fall out of the race with a mechanical failure while running inside the top-five. He would then blow the motor in his second Sunset outing, running teammate Roy Passer’s car for the feature. When the tour headed on the road to Delaware Speedway, he would once again suffer a mechanical failure after contact while running once again in the top-five, resulting in a 12th place finish.
Since then, though, he has been on a roll, finishing either first or second through the remaining six races on the schedule.
“It’s a new car and you always got new things to go through,” he added. “But once we got the bugs all out of it, the thing has been a rocket ever since. Looking forward to next year.”
Given his strong finish to the 2015 season, Fitzpatrick is obviously one of the drivers that everybody will have their eye on next year for the championship.
