Mardis makes more progress in Lucas Oil Modified series

The next race in the Lucas Oil Modified series will be at Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino June 9 and Sinister Motorsports driver Jim Mardis said he’s looking forward to being back where he’s comfortable and sleeping in his own bed on a race weekend.

The series rookie from Riverside made his second start May 19 at Havasu 95 Speedway in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., and finished 12th in the 75-lap main event. In a way, it was a step backward from his debut race, an eighth at Lucas Oil I-10 Speedway in Blythe on April 28, but Mardis sees more positives than negatives.

“I wouldn’t say I was disappointed at all,” he said. “I’m excited about the fact I’m learning every race. When I ran eighth the first race, that was amazingly good for my first time out. We’re going to struggle and we’re going to have good times, but the more I learn each week the better I’ll be at the following race.”

The next event (June 9) in the nine-race series is at Orange Show Speedway, the quarter-mile paved oval that has been the racing home to Mardis for several years. The 21-year-old won the ASA Stock Pony championship at the track last year and has a win there this season. So he’ll be approaching that race differently than he did last week’s event.

“It was definitely an interesting experience,” Mardis said of racing on that quarter-mile oval. “I’d never seen the place before. It’s a unique track (with progressive banking).

“It’s a very, very difficult track to try to get hold of and learn. There’s really, really tough competition in the division and that makes it difficult to try to get hold of the track and not worry about where you’re setting on time.

“We didn’t hit on what we needed to hit on for the race. The car was good in qualifying. I qualified seventh (of 31). But the changes we made to the car made it go backwards. The car got worse and worse as the race went on and it took everything I had just to keep going in a straight line.”

The result may have been less than hoped for, but the objective at the moment is learning and Mardis did that.

“I learned a tremendous amount by going to Havasu, a track I’d never seen before in a car I’d only been in once,” he said. “I learned how to adapt to conditions a lot better.”

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