Three of the four elite classes at this year’s ROAR Nationals were swept on Friday, with Dakotah Phend cleaning up in Stadium Truck, Ryan Maifield dominating Short Course, and Ty Tessman topping the first two rounds of 4WD in spectacular fashion. Not one of those drivers was able to wrap up the overall TQ in the third round, however, with new faces topping the charts while the 2WD buggy division remained wide open.
Kyosho’s Jared Tebo kept his hopes for the Stadium Truck TQ alive by capturing the third round win with his prototype RT6, beating Phend’s time by nearly three seconds in the cooler Saturday morning conditions. Phend held on for second place points, which won’t come into play at all as he already has two zeroes, but it did push down Ryan Cavalieri to third as the defending champ finished just 36-hundredths behind. Steven Hartson joined the top three with an 18-lap run that erased his DNF from yesterday; now with eight points via his two fourth-place finishes, Hartson will start in the top half of the field for tomorrow’s triple-A Mains.
Modified Stadium Truck – Round Three
- Jared Tebo – 18/6:13.393
- Dakotah Phend – 18/6:16.190
- Ryan Cavalieri – 18/6:16.551
- Steven Hartson – 18/6:19.304
- Nolan Anderson – 17/6:04.808
- Billy Fischer – 17/6:09.768
- Cody Hollis – 17/6:10.416
- Tyler Vik – 17/6:14.471
- Kevin Motter – 17/6:15.324
- Mike Truhe – 17/6:15.805
After capturing the first two rounds of Short Course on Friday it looked like the only thing that could beat Ryan Maifield was a mechanical issue – and that’s exactly what happened in the third round. Maifield’s DNF left the door wide open for Dustin Evans to grab the round win after Kody Numedahl’s late-race mistake, but a much slower run means that the third round TQ will have little effect on the overall TQ; in order to beat Maifield on the tiebreaker, which is the combined times of your fastest two rounds, Dustin will have to break the Short Course track record by a whopping nine seconds. Floridian JR Mitch had his best run of the weekend to finish third, the fastest 16-lap run of the round by mere thousands of a second ahead of Ryan Lutz and JP Richards.
Modified 2WD Short Course – Round Three
- Dustin Evans – 17/6:19.490
- Kody Numedahl – 17/6:24.860
- JR Mitch – 16/6:04.017
- Ryan Lutz – 16/6:04.069
- JP Richards – 16/6:04.390
- Tanner Denney – 16/6:11.649
- Chad Due – 16/6:12.176
- Justin Gilkison – 15/6:00.259
- Gary O’Brien – 15/6:13.588
- Josh Hanna – 14/6:03.213
Dakotah Phend was a kindergartener in 2002 when the XXX-4 was released, and that’s the car he drove to the Round Three win with an upset over the Hot Bodies D413 prototype of Ty Tessmann. Just like the second round, Tessmann had a few rough laps in the beginning of the run and spent the remainder of the six-minute race playing catch-up, this time coming up 1.5 seconds short of the round win and the overall TQ. Tessmann had to pass both Ryan Cavalieri and Jared Tebo on the clock to climb back to second, as the top four drivers completed 19 laps ahead of now-privateer Carson Wernimont. Dustin Evans joined Phend in the top six with a XXX-4 as well, doing so from the B-heat after a rough go on Friday.
Modified 4WD Buggy – Round Three
- Dakotah Phend – 19/6:14.648
- Ty Tessmann – 19/6:16.094
- Ryan Cavalieri – 19/6:19.765
- Jared Tebo – 19/6:19.881
- Carson Wernimont – 18/6:02.180
- Dustin Evans – 18/6:02.372
- Ryan Lutz – 18/6:03.311
- Barry Baker – 18/6:03.381
- Ryan Maifield – 18/6:04.828
- Travis Amezcua – 18/6:05.698
In the third round of 2WD Modified the top four drivers shuffled through nearly every time by the line – it wasn’t until later in the race that Dakotah Phend, the only rear-motor car anywhere close to the top of the field, started to pull away as he finished a shade over eight-tenths ahead of a surging Ryan Cavalieri. Phend’s round win, particularly with previous round TQ’s Ryan Maifield (3rd) and Tessman (7th) finishing further down the order, pushes the overall class TQ to the final qualifier for that ever-important advantage on the starting line for Sunday’s championship-deciding triple A-Mains.
- Dakotah Phend – 18/6:06.989
- Ryan Cavalieri – 18/6:07.837
- Ryan Maifield – 18/6:08.092
- Jared Tebo – 18/6:11.434
- Kody Numedahl – 18/6:14.166
- Billy Fischer – 18/6:14.752
- Ty Tessmann – 18/6:15.592
- Ryan Lutz – 18/6:15.175
- Nolan Anderson – 18/6:17.035
- Chad Due – 18/6:19.950
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