After several years away, the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East returns to South Boston Speedway Saturday for the WhosYourDriver.org Twin 100s. And race fans will have several familiar names and faces competing at the Virginia short track.
Most notably, NASCAR Next driver Harrison Burton is coming off his first career series win. The 16-year-old from Huntersville, North Carolina, won the rain-shortened race at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and assumed the series points lead.
While it will be the youngster’s first series race at the historic venue, his family has plenty of laps around the .400-mile oval.
Jeff Burton and his brother, Ward, raced in the track’s Late Model Stock Car division en route to careers in NASCAR’s premier Cup series. Jeff Burton made his second career NASCAR XFINITY Series start at South Boston in 1988 and finished 17th. He made eight starts there under the old Busch Series banner, with a win in 1991. Two sections of the front stretch grandstands bear the name of Jeff and Ward, and Jeff, a current analyst as NBCSN, will be the grand marshal Saturday.
Saturday night’s field will include a pair of drivers innately familiar with the oval: Matt Bowling and Peyton Sellers. Both used title runs in the track’s Late Model division to power them to NASCAR Whelen All-American Series national championships.
Sellers accomplished the feat in 2005, and won another track title in 2014. Bowling won his first track title in 2012, and won back-to-back titles in 2015 and ’16.
Sellers, who has two K&N Pro Series wins in 44 prior starts, will be in the No. 18 Danville Toyota Toyota fielded by Hunt-Sellers Racing. In two career K&N Pro Series East starts at South Boston, Sellers — who finished third in the final 2007 series standings — has never finished worse than third at his home track, where he also won the pole for the inaugural race in 2007.
Bowling, the 2016 national champion, will be making his series debut in Ted Marsh’s No. 31 Whelen Engineering Chevrolet. He scored one of the biggest wins of his career at South Boston, when he held off a stacked field that included Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin among others to win the Denny Hamlin Short Track Showdown in 2014.
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