KNOXVILLE, I.A.- Following Thursday’s prelim night at Knoxville Raceway, all the talk is about NASCAR Cup Series champion and defending Knoxville Nationals winner Kyle Larson.
The man being overlooked is Daryn Pittman.
While Larson won the night’s 25-lap feature and will start from pole for the second year in a row for the Nationals, he doesn’t sit alone at the top of the event standings.
After an outstanding night for Pittman and the No. 69k team, he and Larson both sit with 490 qualifying points (out of a possible 500). Larson earned the tiebreaker, meaning Pittman will start on the outside of the front row for Saturday’s 50-lap, $190,000-to-win main event.
Pittman used an early pill-draw to lay down an absolute flyer in time trials, scoring him the fast time and 200 points in the process. The Oklahoma native wasn’t done there, either. Following an eight car invert, Pittman drove from the eighth starting spot to score the heat race win with a last-lap pass on Landon Crawley, netting him another 100 points.
Those results set up the possibility for Pittman to notch a perfect score, something that hadn’t been done since David Gravel accomplished it in 2017 – the only time it’s happened in the 21st century.
But a perfect night wasn’t meant to be for Pittman. Another eight car invert lined the No. 69k up in eighth for the 25-lap main event. Pittman fell down as far as ninth before charging back to sixth late in the going, just missing out on a top-five.
Nonetheless, a score of 490 left him starting second for Saturday with as good a shot as anyone to take home the biggest race in all of Sprint Car Racing.
“The goal is always to put it in the show,” Pittman told Frontstretch. “There’s obviously teams that come here expecting to win or contend for wins, we hope to, but I think it would be not truthful if we thought we would actually come and contend, or have a shot at starting on the front row. So I’m ecstatic about that, obviously I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little disappointed that we lost the tiebreak and didn’t get the pole.
“But man, front row, we’ve got a great spot, just have to keep working on our car a little bit, I mean its got a lot of speed to race with these guys, Rico [Abreu], [Kyle] Larson and Gio [Scelzi], [Carson] Macedo.”
Like many others, Pittman has noticed a change in the racing surface from prior years, but overall felt good about the piece he has underneath him for Saturday.
“Yeah I mean honestly, I don’t think we have to adjust our car a whole lot,” Pittman said. “We’ve got to make a few minor tweaks, and I don’t think that we have to do a lot for the 50 laps. The racetrack has been really weird this year in that it’s almost like it’s wetter at the end of the night than it starts off…my car was as good at the end of that 25-laps as it was at the biggening and we’ll kind of use that information to decide what we need to do at the halfway mark.”
As for notetaking on Friday, Pittman says he won’t bother. The Oklahoman doesn’t believe the track Friday will be representative of the conditions the field will see come feature time on Saturday.
“Truthfully in my opinion none,” Pittman said of crossover from Friday. “I’m not saying that’s right but to me Friday is always the driest. I feel like the racetrack Friday night is, I think they start a little bit earlier, more cars time trial, there’s more racing. To me it’s just not a track condition that even correlates over to Saturday, you go from Friday being the most laps that’s on the racetrack to Saturday being the least.”
“So we’ll watch, enjoy watching a good show, try to learn if we feel like there’s something that we can learn, but I don’t think we’ve ever really seen a Saturday A-main that looks anything like a Friday, or not in very recent past.”
The 2013 World of Outlaws champion and 2008 Kings Royal winner will look to add a Knoxville Nationals victory to his resume on Saturday night.
Chase began working with Frontstretch in the spring of 2023 as a news writer, while also helping fill in for other columns as needed. Chase is now the main writer and reporter for Frontstretch.com's CARS Tour coverage, a role which began late in 2023. Aside from racing, some of Chase's other hobbies include time in the outdoors hunting and fishing, and keeping up with all things Philadelphia sports related.