Patrick Long won the South Jersey Building Trades 150 at New Jersey Motosports Park by fending off teammate Parker Kligerman in the closing laps of the race. A Full Course Caution with nine laps to go set up a wild finish, as Kligerman and Long broke away from the field on the restart.
Patrick Long’s dominant weekend at New Jersey started Saturday afternoon when went to the top of the charts in both practice sessions and scored the Menards Pole Award presented by Ansell. Long led the race twice for 46 laps en route to a dominant win.
“I knew on the restart it was going to be a showdown because there’s a peak of about four laps where a new tire just has tremendous grip but the harder you drive it, it just keeps falling off,” said Long. “That kid (Kligerman) has so much talent and so much aggression. I knew he was coming. I actually give him a lot of credit for showing huge patience and maturity. He has a championship to race for and he ran very smart-years beyond his age and maturity. I wasn’t going to take him off as a team car. I was given the opportunity by Cunningham Motorsports to come here and help really get him up to speed and help him win this weekend. The objective was to win and to get the 4 car on the top step after quite a long dry spell but also to help him out so I wasn’t going to knock him out at the end but I was going to run as hard as I could for the lead.”
Parker Kligerman’s second place finished tied him with Justin Lofton atop the ARCA Re/Max Series championship standings. Kligerman’s remarkable seven wins, including a Labor Day victory on the dirt at the DuQuoin State Fairgrounds “Magic Mile”, gives him the points lead as he has more victories than Lofton.
“The last restart we just focused on not spinning the tires and trying to get a break from the third and fourth place guys so that we could go out there and fight with Patrick [Long] since he was the main opposition,” said Kligerman. “From there we just kind of ran. We were just kind of waiting for him to make a big enough mistake so that we could slip by and we just pressured and pressured him until he made a huge mistake and he went off the track. And when he came back on the track I thought he was going to go flying across so I slowed down so that he didn’t come sliding across and go sliding into our door. Instead he stopped on the track right in front of us and we had nowhere to go but the dirt so we went into the dirt, came back and then we went at it for one more lap, kind of side-by-side down into one then hit off of each other a little more and then there was nothing we could do from there.”
Spencer Pumpelly finished third for TRG Motorsports, Robb Brent finished fourth and Tim George, Jr. finished fifth. Justin Lofton faded to sixth in the final running order after late race contact with Pumpelly damaged the Lofton Cattle Toyota Camry.
There are only three races left in the ARCA Re/Max Series Championship race. Next race for the ARCA Re/Max Series will be at the high banked Salem Speedway. The final two races are at Kansas Speedway and Rockingham Speedway.
RacingForTheWin.com’s Steve McDermott and Andy Marquis contributed to this report.
