Craig Goess finished a solid sixth in Friday night's ARCA RE/MAX Series event at Toledo Speedway (OH). His Labor Day Weekend ended early on Monday though when a crash left him 34th at DuQuoin State Fairgrounds (IL).
Before getting dirty at DuQuoin, Goess had a fun day at Toledo on Friday, where he was just one spot short of a top-five finish.
“Toledo wasn’t bad,” said Goess. “We just couldn’t get the car the way we wanted to off the corner and stay running with the top five. We dodged a bunch of wrecks and it was a pretty fun night. I could have run another 200 laps there. I wish we could have done a little better, but it wasn’t too bad.”
Goess turned his attention Sunday to the dirt ARCA race at DuQuoin. Even though he wasn’t a fan of the facility, he tried to make the best of the day, but ended up wrecked and out of a decent finish.
“I have never seen a track like that anywhere. It was a dump,” explained Goess. “With the kind of money the teams spend in this series, there are more attractive venues we could be going to instead of a place like that.
“In qualifying I slid into the soft stuff and almost wrecked. I collected it and still ended up qualifying 12th. We probably would have qualified in the top five. After that, the track kept getting darker. The track changed so much and I didn’t know what to tell them to do to the car. It was a little off during the race, but we got in a wreck in the first 10 laps of the race. There was a huge pile of dirt in turn two and the guys in front of me were hitting it and snapping the car loose. Those guys wrecked and we got in it because we were so close and there wasn’t anything we could do to avoid it on dirt.”
After ending the weekend on a bad note, Goess and the #81 Greenville Toyota Camry team are ready to get back on asphalt at their next race, which is the road course at New Jersey Motorsports Park (NJ) on September 13th.
“I am looking forward to getting back on asphalt, but it is still unfamiliar territory and it is a road course. We had a fairly decent test there, so I am looking to run my own race there, not flat-spot any tires, not run off course, and hopefully everything will take care of itself.”
Craig Goess Has Mixed Results on Labor Day Weekend
Veteran Racer Takes on Busy ARCA Weekend
Craig Goess had a busy weekend of both asphalt and dirt racing with the ARCA RE/MAX Series. (51 Sports Photo)
