The NASCAR K&N Pro Series East heads back to South Carolina this week for its second visit of the year to Greenville Pickens Speedway on Saturday, Sept. 6.
The Greenville 140 at the historic half-mile oval is one of two races remaining on the schedule as the 2014 season winds down.
Coming off back-to-back road course races, Nick Drake is anxious to get back on an oval and aims to finish off his rookie season with a strong performance.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Drake said of returning to Greenville Pickens Speedway. “Hopefully we can have a good outing.
“We need to redeem ourselves there from last time,” he said, referring to his 16th-place finish there in March. “I’ve learned a ton more over the year. We’ve been good on the other ovals lately. And we ran good on the two road courses, but we just didn’t have much luck.”
The 18-year-old from Mooresville, North Carolina has garnered one pole, three top-five and seven top-10 finishes in 14 career series starts this year – driving the No. 15 NAPA AUTO PARTS Toyota for Bill McAnally Racing.
“Coming into the season, I didn’t know what to expect,” Drake said. “We took on the whole stock car deal pretty quickly. The results haven’t really shown how good we’ve run this year.”
He attributed those subpar finishes to some bad luck in a few events.
“Everyone knows we’ve been running good all year,” he said. “That’s been a good thing. We’ve improved a ton since the first race at New Smyrna.”
Drake, who had a career-best second-place finish in the K&N Pro Series East-West combination race at Iowa Speedway in May, is second in the Sunoco Rookie of the Year standings and ninth in the overall championship standings.
The 12 previous series visits to Greenville Pickens Speedway resulted in 11 different winners. Darrell Wallace Jr. was the only driver with multiple wins there.
BMR PR
