The ARCA Racing Series presented by Menards winds down its 2014 season with the 20th and final race of the season, the ARCA 98.9 at Kansas Speedway. With two victories in the books already and a fifth-place finish in the season standings all but assured, Justin Boston enters the weekend with one goal in mind: winning the race.
“We’ve had such a good car on the mile and a half tracks this year, I really want to close the year out with a win,” Boston said. “We built this car new at the beginning of the year, and then had to rebuild it basically from the ground up after it got crashed at Pocono. But we almost won with it at Chicagoland so we know it’s capable.”
It’s also the same No. 25 ZLOOP/JACO Environmental Camry that Boston drove to his fourth Menards Pole Award of the season last time out at the Kentucky Speedway. Boston lead early but lost track position on pit road kept him from a top-five finish, something he looks to rectify at Kansas.
“The two tracks are so different,” he said , comparing Kentucky and Kansas. “Kansas is so smooth, and so fast and it’s really a ton of fun to drive. We’re going to work on getting our car set up so we can hold it as close to wide open as possible. If we can do that, we should be up at the front of the field all night long.”
If not for a rough spate of luck at the beginning of the season, Boston would likely be in the mix for the championship entering the final race of the year. As it is, he’s virtually locked into the fifth position, but has nothing but respect for champ-to-be Mason Mitchell.
“It’s really incredible what they’ve done this year,” he said. “To come out of the box with a first-year team and outrun teams that have been doing this for thirty years is really impressive. I’ve had a great time racing with Mason this year. We’ve raced each other really hard – and I think we’ve made each other mad a time or two – and we pushed each other to be the best. It’s a shame we gave up 400 points in the first five races of the year with things outside of our control because I would have liked to have given him a run for his money. But congrats to Mason and his team, they’ve had a great year; I’m really happy for them.”
Despite not being in the championship hunt, Boston has a positive vibe about his season as a whole.
“It’s a double-edged sword because we’re here to win a championship and through some really bad luck early in the season we weren’t able to do that,” he said. “But once we got our season on track we’ve been fast week in and week out and we won some races. So in that respect we’ve been happy with how we performed this year. We have one more chance to win a race, and we don’t have anything to lose in the points so we’re going for it. Winning three races is a whole lot better than winning two in our book.”
The ARCA 98.9 at Kansas Speedway will be televised live on Friday night, October 3 at 8:30 P.M. Eastern on Fox Sports 2. ARCARacing.com will have live timing and scoring throughout the day’s practice and qualifying as well as the race.
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