McCreadie’s Batesville win follows familiar road map

LOCUST GROVE — Tim McCreadie passed Jimmy Owens coming to the white flag to take victory in Thursday night’s preliminary feature of the 28th annual Comp Cams Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway.

A second preliminary card was held Friday, and the 100lap, $40,000-to-win finale is slated for tonight.

For McCreadie, of Watertown, N.Y., the victory was quite similar to last week’s North-South 100 at Union, Ky., Owens when in the he closing chased laps down to claim the $50,000 victory. On Thursday, Owens started on the pole and took the lead at the green flag. McCreadie, who started sixth, moved into second place on the 19th lap and pulled to the outside of Owens with two laps to go. McCreadie reached the checkered flag .986 seconds ahead of Owens.

“It’s tough to lead here when you come on lapped traffic, and that’s probably part of it,” McCreadie, the 2008 Topless winner, told dirtondirt.com. “If I was leading, it probably would’ve been Jimmy doing it to me.”

Owens, of Newport, Tenn., agreed lead Batesville. in traffic that maintaining is difficult at a

“We were good early,” said Owens, the 2009 and 2014 Topless winner. “But once we got into them lapped cars and got into that dirty air, I just couldn’t come off the corner anywhere and didn’t really know where to be on the track. We moved around and moved up a little bit, but it seemed like the bottom was the dominant way around. But I just couldn’t get through the center of the corners as good as I wanted to.”

Dale McDowell of Chickamauga, Ga., finished third. The 2004 Topless winner, McDowell’s last Topless start came in 2015, when he finished third.

“We hadn’t been out here in three or four years and been watching it all on streaming and checking everything out,” he said. “But we’re closer.”

Earl Pearson of Jacksonville, Fla., finished fourth and Batesville’s Billy Moyer Jr. was fifth. Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., whose team is owned by Lance Landers of Batesville, took sixth.

Other Arkansans qualifying for the preliminary feature of the 48 entrants were Timothy Culp of Prattsville in 15th, Trumann’s Kyle Beard in 21st, four-time winner Billy Moyer in 22nd, and 1998 winner Wendell Wallace of Batesville in 23rd.