Top Five Finish Tops Off Spring Nationals Season

PELHAM, AL - With the Spring Nationals coming to an end, a massive top five finish secures a fifth place points finish for Caden Mullinax.

On Friday, May 26th, Caden Mullinax and the Mullinax Racing Team headed north to Sweetwater, Tennessee for the first leg of a three race Memorial Day weekend to decide the final finishing order in the Schaeffer's Oil Spring Nationals Series points. The race was going to be a $7,553 to win forty lap shootout at I-75 Raceway, a track that neither Caden nor the team had ever been to before.

Going into the race Caden was just holding onto fifth in the points before each driver was gifted two dropped races by six points over David McCoy and would need a good result in order to hold onto that position. When Caden went out for hot laps he discovered that the motor did not have the power that he had expected, so the team got to work to discover the issue before qualifying.

The power issues lasted all the way through the B-Mains, forcing the team to take their last provisional of the season in order to make the show. Caden would start on the last row, alongside McCoy who had also been forced to take a provisional after being unable to race his way into the show.

In the opening laps of the race, Caden's motor seemed to gain its power again and the young driver started moving his way forward, even up to fourteenth. Then, after a caution reset the field, forcing Caden to start on the outside, the power issues came back.

Caden fought hard to keep as many of his positions as possible and finished a respectable sixteenth in the race. With McCoy finishing fourteenth in the race, Caden led his rival by only two points going into the penultimate race in North Georgia.

When the team arrived at North Georgia on Saturday morning, they diligently got to work in order to solve the power issues that plagued Caden the night before. The well rested team was able to find the issue before hot laps and Caden was finally able to be set loose in his Black Diamond Late Model.

During qualifying Caden reported that his car was bottoming out on the race track, only allowing him to earn a seventh place starting position in the first heat race, the most difficult heat race in the bunch. During the heat race, adjustments made to the car allowed him to race better but a cut in his right rear tire forced him into a seventh place finish and a fifth place starting spot in the B-Main.

Caden raced valiantly in his heat race, beating fellow Spring Nationals rookie, Hayden Cowen, but he ultimately could not overcome his fifth place starting spot and fell just two positions short of advancing to the feature event. Due to missing the show, Caden was now sixth in the points and after the two dropped races allowed to each driver, he sat just fourteen points behind McCoy for fifth.

As the team rolled up to Duck River they knew that they would need to have a good finish in order to get that top five points spot in the Spring Nationals. Confidence for the team had never been higher as the series made its final stop at a familiar track in this fifty three lap, $10,053 to win race.

Caden was placed in the first group of qualifying and ran a 13.9 second lap which was good enough for ninth in Group A, giving Caden a fifth place starting spot in the heat races. When the first lap of the heat race the start was called off, Caden slowed down but the car starting behind never got the memo and drove into Caden's door causing damage to the left side.

He was able to continue and when the race was started properly Caden got to work early by moving up to third in just one lap. By lap five Caden had raced his way to second where he would finish, thus earning himself his best ever starting position in a national series race with fifth.

The team fixed the body damage quickly and it was time for Caden to start the race with his rival McCoy starting sixteenth, a gap that Caden needed to keep. Caden battled the first few laps of the feature with Chase Oliver but once the M2 cleared Oliver's car he built a manageable gap between the two and even ran lap times similar to the leaders.

The race went caution free for all fifty three laps and Caden never let the race leader gain more than a straightaway lead on him until lap cars got in the way. The incredible drive by Cannonball Caden rewarded him with his first ever top five finish in a national series race and securing himself the fifth place spot in the Spring Nationals points.

This season in the Schaeffer's Oil Spring Nationals was full of battles, hardships, and scrappy drives by the young Caden Mullinax. Now with this success added to his resume, the driver looks to take his M2 Black Diamond to even bigger and better races in the near future.

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