SELINSGROVE, Pa. — After close calls in his previous two trips to Selinsgrove Speedway, Logan Seavey conquered the half-mile dirt track to win Sunday night’s Bill Holland Classic USAC Silver Crown Series race.
Seavey thwarted a last-ditch effort by second-running C.J. Leary on the first lap of a green-white-checkered shootout, then pulled away once more for good measure to win his first career USAC Silver Crown race worth $8,075 in celebration of the track’s 75th anniversary.
Aboard his Rice Motorsports/Fatheadz Eyewear – STIDA.com – Lucas Oil/DRC/Pink Foxco Chevy, Seavey became the first first-time Silver Crown race winner since Jacob Wilson at the Du Quoin (Ill.) State Fairgrounds in 2019.
A succession of race winners have proceeded to victory lane thus far during the first half of the season with five different drivers capturing victories during the first five events to start the season. That’s the first time that’s happened since 2013.
After a number of close calls coming into what was his eighth career series start, Seavey made Sunday’s Selinsgrove stop his turn on the merry-go-round of race winners.
“I feel like we had a great chance to win Williams Grove, but it got taken from us with a part failure,” Seavey recalled. “We have speed right now, which is awesome, and it’s cool to get my first Silver Crown win. I love this series. I know I’m new at it but I’m just having so much fun.”
After bursting onto the USAC scene as the champion in his Rookie National Midget season of 2018, Seavey has since branched out to USAC’s AMSOIL National Sprint Car division, recently winning three-in-a-row during Indiana Sprint Week, and has now translated that success to Silver Crown racing.
In fact, Seavey has now won feature events in all three of USAC’s National series in 2021, joining Justin Grant in the exclusive club, which Grant put himself in one night before.
But with Silver Crown being his newest foray, and with talented individual crewman Robbie Rice, Ronnie Gardner and Joe Devin at the helm of the team, Seavey feels right at home.
“Growing up, I always just wanted to race midgets,” Seavey revealed. “As soon as I got to the National series, I realized I was doing okay in midgets, but I feel like this fits me so well. It’s a perfect mixture of running hard and saving your tires, trying to find speed and the balance of both, and it’s going so well. I’ve got a really good racecar and it drives like a dream.”
A heartbreaking second-place finish for Leary last year at Selinsgrove was replaced by a bit more satisfying of a runner-up finish on Sunday, which began with him lowering his own personal USAC Silver Crown track record at Selinsgrove with a time of 21.185 in Fatheadz Eyewear Qualifying in his Leary Racing/Leary Construction – Gray Auto – Valvoline/DRC/1-Way Toyota.
“We’re a lot happier than we were last year after such a good run,” Leary admitted. “It was another good run tonight; the car was really good. We gambled with the softer tire, and I waited too long. I let Logan get too big of a lead. I felt like I was running him down a little bit there in traffic, but it was just too much to overcome and on that restart, I saw Chris (Windom), and right before the yellow, he was yarding me off the bottom of two. I was like, ‘man, I might be able to make that work.’ I just tried to run hard enough to keep Jake (Swanson) behind me. I was going to do that to Logan, but he was so good there early and I let him get too far away. These races are so hard to win, and a lot of strategy goes into it. Ours just didn’t play out tonight.”
Jake Swanson finished third.
“We were really good,” Swanson said. “I just feel like there’s a few things I could’ve done better there to get by C.J. I think I squeezed a little bit too hard too early and used up my stuff to where I could just maintain with them. At the end of it, I was just hoping I could keep up with them and maybe in a position to capitalize on something. These guys are really good and it’s rare when they make mistakes, but when they do, it’s still hard to capitalize on. I’m really happy, really pumped with our result, our best finish.”
To see full results, turn to the next page.