Daison Pursley led 27 of 30 laps on the way to winning the POWRi Lucas Oil National Midget League’s Meents Memorial at I-44 Riverside Speedway Saturday night, giving Keith Kunz Motorsports a Sooner State sweep of the weekend’s three POWRi events in Oklahoma.
The win gives Pursley seven national midget feature triumphs in 2021 and follows back-to-back victories by Buddy Kofoid on Friday at Port City Raceway and Saturday at I-44 Riverside Speedway.
Starting from the pole, Pursley immediately went to the lead over Emilio Hoover, with Gavan Boschele in third, Cannon McIntosh in fourth and Chance Crum rounding out the top five.
By lap six, McIntosh would move up to second, followed by Joe B. Miller and Kofoid. Pursley would continue to lead the race, but McIntosh would begin to close as the race neared the halfway point. By lap 15, McIntosh had closed to within 0.083 seconds and then would overtake Pursley for the top spot one lap later, as Kofoid would also moved up to take over the third spot.
Pursley stayed right with McIntosh over the next three laps and would then regain the lead on lap 19. As the race entered the final 10 laps, Pursley would begin to pull away and opened up more than a second lead by lap 24 before a caution would wave on lap 26, bunching the field one last time.
Pursley would maintain the lead on the restart as things began to heat up in the battle for second with Kofoid closing on McIntosh. By lap 28, Kofoid would power past for the second spot. Pursley took advantage of the battle for second to pull away from his competitors, driving off to a 1.213-second win over Kofoid, who earned his third consecutive top-two finish with the second-place showing, while McIntosh finished on the podium for the second time in three races by finishing third, giving Toyota its third consecutive podium sweep.
In addition, five more Toyota-powered drivers captured top-10 finishes on the night with Chance Crum in fifth, followed by Jade Adevisian in sixth, Bryant Wiedeman in seventh, Brenham Crouch in eighth and Sam Johnson in tenth.
POWRI closes out its 2021 season with a pair of races at Caney Valley Speedway in Caney, Kansas, November 5-6, where Wiedeman can become the youngest national midget champion in history at age 16 simply by starting his heat race.
TRD PR
