The hallmark accomplishment list of NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour achievements has been getting a lot of items checked off of late by driver Ron Silk.
Series championship? Silk checked that box last season. Icebreaker victory at Thompson International Speedway? Did that April 15 to open the 2012 season.
Silk, of Norwalk, goes looking to keep the streak of big one’s rolling when he heads to Stafford Motor Speedway this weekend for the 41st Tech-Net Spring Sizzler weekend at the half-mile oval.
On the Whelen Modified Tour schedule these days, no event carries more tradition and history than the Sizzler, and that fact isn’t lost on the 29-year old Silk.
“You look at like the old Thompson 300 race, I’m not going to get a shot to try and win one of those because we don’t get to race that anymore,” Silk said. “You never know, hopefully the Sizzler is around forever, I hope it is. But that race probably has the most tradition that we have left on our series and I’d definitely like to get one of those. It’s definitely one of the bigger things I have left to do. I don’t feel by any means that I’ve accomplished anywhere close to everything I want to accomplish, but that’s certainly probably the biggest single race on our schedule that I haven’t won yet.”
Silk’s only Whelen Modified Tour victory at Stafford came on May 27, 2011, but he has proved to be one of the most dominant drivers in series events at the track over the last two seasons. In the last six Modified Tour events at Stafford Silk has an average finish of 3.8, his worst finish during that span being a seventh.
“My confidence is really high at Stafford,” Silk said. “Ever since I started racing on the Tour there, even when I had my own car when I first started, I would always go there and qualify like sixth and seventh. Lately we’ve been able to run really well there and finish well. I won a race there last year and finished on the podium a bunch of times so that really has my confidence high going there.”
For Silk, winning the season opener on April 15 at Thompson went a long way in showing that the 2011 championship for he and his Ed Partridge owned race team was no fluke.
At Thompson the team took a car seemingly destined for a finish in the bottom half of the top-10 and put Silk in the position to fight for the win.
“It says that we’ve got a lot of smart guys on the team,” Silk said. “Sixth or seventh isn’t where we want to run but that’s about where we were over the first [half of the Icebreaker]. I just told the guys over the radio what the car was doing and they came up with the changes to make and they made the right ones because at the end my car was great.”
“I was pretty confident that we would go to Thompson and run good. It’s always been a good track for me. But it’s certainly nice, coming off a championship and winning the first race for sure. But I expected us to run well so I’m just happy that we did.”
Qualifying for the Modified Tour is Saturday at Stafford. The 200-lap Modified Tour event anchors a Sunday schedule at Stafford that will also include a 40-lap NASCAR Whelen All-American Series SK Modified feature and a 30-lap Late Model feature. Saturday’s schedule will include 20-lap features for the SK Light Modified and Limited Late Model divisions and 15-lap feature for the DARE Stock division.
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