Pursley Nets Seventh Place Finish at Iowa
Gene Price Motorsports Driver Greg Pursley Loses Engine in Practice, Scores Pole, and Finishes Seventh
PARKER, ARIZONA (September 5, 2009) – Greg Pursley, driver of the Gene Price Motorsports Chevrolet on the NASCAR Camping World Series, continued his streak of top ten finishes Friday night by rallying to a seventh place finish at Iowa Speedway. The finish was Pursley’s tenth top ten finish of the season and kept him in third place of the championship standings heading into the final race of the season in three weeks.
Pursley’s Iowa experience did not start out like the team planned. After only five laps during the first practice session, the Gene Price Motorsports Chevrolet lost an engine. The team quickly went to work changing power plants and were able to send Pursley back out for a few laps just as the final practice session ended. “The crew was flawless in changing the engine,” Pursley said. “All we really lost was some track time as the car was really good.”
Good was an understatement. Pursley laid down a blistering lap in qualifying to score his second career Coors Light Pole Award with a time of 24.074 seconds/130.847 mph to lead all qualifiers. That was the good news. By virtue of the NASCAR rule book, Pursley would have to start the 125-lap race at the rear of the field for changing engines.
That setback seemed only minor as Pursley was able to navigate the lap traffic over the opening laps and pick off position after position. By lap ten, the Parker, Arizona resident had moved inside the top fifteen and looked to have one of the fastest cars on the track.
At the lap 50 mark, the race had stayed green and Pursley was up to the tenth position. The first caution came out on lap 57 which bunched up the field for the restart. A break Pursley needed. Pursley used the next eight laps to move into the seventh position before the caution flew for the mandatory ten minute break that would set up a fifty lap shoot out to the finish.
After the break the cars lined up in the order they were running starting side-by-side. Pursley lost a couple of positions on the restart but methodically took each position back over the next several laps. After a caution on lap 91, Pursley restarted the race in the eighth position and battled with several competitors over the closing laps to finish seventh. Pursley managed to get as high as fifth but his battery lost juice with four laps to go and he limped to the finish line.
“All in all it was a good day for the Gene Price Motorsports team,” Pursley stated. “We have such a great group of guys working on the car so the engine deal was a minor setback. We were fast but the changes we made during the pit stop were not enough to move us forward. We are happy to leave Iowa with the car in one piece and head to the finale at All American.”
With his seventh place finish, Pursley maintains the third position in the point standings only 107 points behind second place and 185 points out of first place with one race left on the 2009 NCWS schedule. In his first season driving for Gene Price Motorsports, Pursley has one win, seven top five and ten top ten finishes in twelve starts.
Greg Pursley, in his second full season of competition in the NCWS, made his NCWS series debut back in 1999 at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, CA and has 28 career series starts with one win (Thunder Hill 2009), nine top five and 15 top ten performances. Pursley is the 2004 NASCAR Whelen All American Series national champion where he competed at Toyota Speedway and was a multi-time winner on the now defunct NASCAR Southwest Tour where he competed for many years. The Central Iowa Building and Construction Trades“125” from Iowa Speedway will be televised on SPEED Channel Thursday, September 10 at 12 noon PT. The NASCAR Camping World Series is in its 56th season of competition and is one of the nation’s oldest stock car racing series. The next event for Gene Price Motorsports and driver Greg Pursley is Saturday, September 26 at All American Speedway in Roseville, CA.
