[JessicaJ]

Tri-State Proves to Be a Winning Formula for Gage Walker
By Jessica Jenkins

After taking a couple weeks off from POWRi racing (during which he finished 3rd at Montpelier Motor Speedway on July 25th), Gage Walker returned with a vengeance. Pulling into Tri-State Speedway for his debut race at the track would quickly turn into another first for the 17 year old as he would pull off his first ever POWRi feature win.

Saturday evening’s racing started out with Walker on the pole in heat race 2, where he eventually finished second. Walker described the way the race went for him by saying, “I started on the pole in the heat race and dropped to the bottom of the track in the first corner, which didn't work at all, and I dropped back to about 4th or 5th. We had a caution and on the restart I just hammered down up top and made it back up to 2nd which put me starting 5th for the feature.”

That feature was one the Indianapolis-based driver had been working towards for a long time. Speaking about the preparation of the track, Walker described, “It was a really fun and fast track and they kept up on it all night long so it never dried out. We all ran the top on the cushion in the feature and it was pretty much wide open all the way around. The cushion was really rough and took quite a few cars out of the race so it was pretty tricky to run.” But as excepted he was able to maneuver his way around the 1/4 mile dirt track to perfection. By the end of lap one, he had already gained two positions and moved himself up to third. He began tracking down the two leaders before the race’s first red flag waved. Once the field rolled back off, Walker took second and staged a thrilling 3-way battle for the runner up spot, settling into third before the leaders made contact and took each other out. Now holding onto the top spot, Walker sustained some heavy challenges from second place (which he explained as throwing “slide jobs on each other about 10 different times”) and held on through a restart with one to go to claim his first series win. Afterwards, Walker recounted the final lap and shared what it was like to win: “We had a caution with one lap to go and I knew I had been good on restarts so I was pretty confident I could win. It was awesome winning my first POWRi race and it took quite a while for it to settle in.”

With the confidence that naturally come from winning, Walker and his #7x team took off for Belle-Clair Speedway in Southern Illinois on Sunday evening to compete in the Knepper Memorial. While the evening did not go quite as smoothly as the previous night, he was fourth in practice and stated that “the car was really good.” He rolled off from the fourth position in heat 3 and had claimed the runner-up spot by the end of the short race. This lined him up outside row 3 in the Feature, but it only took him two laps to jump inside the top 3. Contact with one of his competitors dropped him back to where he started, but the undeterred Walker immediately went to work on moving back into the top 5. Unfortunately the track started to change, as he observed in his own words: “The car started going away as the track slicked off and I started to lose a couple of positions. I went to slide 7th place back and spun it out right in the middle of the corner with just a couple laps left.” Once the race went back green, he did regain a few of the positions, but ran out of laps and ultimately finished 16th.

The sport of auto racing often seems to work like that, putting you on top of the world one day and sending you back to reality the next. But now that Gage Walker has collected his first win, it would surprise no one if the second victory followed rather quickly. If you can make it out to any POWRi races in August, come cheer on Walker and his family-owned red #7x Spike Chassis/Impact/Walker & Sons/Wilwood Brakes/ Business Art Designs midget!