Bill Okell took advantage of a healthy starting position and a mid-race crash that shortened the race to finish sixth in the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) National Championship Runoffs at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Driving his sleek black-and-red Huffaker Motorsports 1992 MG Midget for the Friday morning (Oct. 1) H Production class race, the Saanich resident started 11th in the 42-car field and moved up to ninth by the third lap. That was when two drivers contesting second place tangled, a mishap that halted the race for about 20 minutes.
Okell narrowly avoided the flipped-over Honda CRX of one of those drivers as he went past the crash zone, and found himself in seventh on the restart. With the clock ticking on the 40-minute race limit and leaving the remaining drivers just over six minutes and three laps around the 2.592-mile road course to sort out the results, Okell passed the 1984 VW Rabbit of Scott Hileman to move up to sixth.
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Continuing to cut the gap Okell caught fifth-place driver Jason LaManna of Rochester, N.Y., also driving an B次元官网网址�84 Rabbit, on the final lap but barely ran out of time to beat him to the checkered flag. LaManna finished a mere 0.064 seconds ahead of Okell.
Race winner Steve Sargis (Frankfort, Ill.), who had built a large lead before the crash erased it, still wound up eight seconds ahead of second-place finisher Christopher Schaffsma (Wheaton, Ill.) and more than 12 seconds faster than Enrik Benazic (Farmingdale, N.Y.).
While the race was shortened from its expected 19 or 20-lap duration to just six, the result bettered OkellB次元官网网址檚 previous finish at Indianapolis of 12th place in the GT Light class.
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