WINNEMUCCA, Nev. – Consistent throughout the 1st Class Chassis Wild West Tour for IMCA Modifieds, champion Cory Sample was a double winner after the tour concluded.
Sample had a pair of third-place finishes and finished no worse than ninth in eight events to pace point standings for the 10th annual tour. He then drew his own number to win a new chassis given by the tour title sponsor, and won the Top 20 Showdown during the Duel In The Desert at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Dirt Track.
“It was definitely the icing on the cake,” said Sample. “We’d wrecked the car at Boone but got it fixed for the Duel. It took us a couple practice sessions to feel comfortable but it was a good note to end on.”
One of just seven drivers to qualify for every WWMT feature, Sample wrapped up the tour championship, by a 15-point margin, with seventh- and sixth-place showings at Desert Thunder Raceway on the final weekend of the season.
“It had been a while since we followed the tour full time. We wanted to get back on the road and travel around,” explained Sample, who had 21 career tour starts and two wins to his credit coming into the year. “Consistency played a big part in the series and we knew we had a good chance to win it after finishing third in both races at Diamond Mountain Speedway.”
He finished the point season in a 2010 Razor he already had 94 wins in after the wreck at Super Nationals.
The track champion at Winnemucca, Nev., Regional Raceway, Sample won nine of his 33 starts overall this season. He’s now 12th on the all-time wins list for the division with 166 career checkers.
“We ran our home track and bounced around a lot,” he said. “I felt like we should have won a handful more races. We struggled with the pill draw on the tour but hit the reset button and got a couple top three’s and felt really good about that.”