~ By Tom Boggie

Twenty-nine wins may not sound like a lot. Heck, there are a lot of modified drivers who have recorded 29 (or more) wins in a season.

But the No. 29 has special significance for two-time Albany-Saratoga Speedway pro stock champion Kim Duell. It means he’s now king of the hill.

Last Friday night, Duell notched the 29^th win of his career at Malta, which broke the track record of 28 pro stock wins that had been held by Rob Yetman.

After the feature, I found Duell in his trailer, and asked him if he had been thinking about the No. 29.

“Definitely, all year. That’s all I’ve been thinking about,” he said with a laugh.

It’s taken him a while to get to the top of the mountain. The 62-year-old Duell started racing hobby stocks in 1977 and switched to modifieds for a while, recording his only three modified wins at Devil’s Bowl, the first in 1988 and the next two during the 1989 campaign.

When his son Scott started racing, Duell opted to climb out of a race car and become crew chief and mentor for his son, who was driving a car owned by Joe Lazzaro. Everyone around Albany-Saratoga knows the name Joe Lazzaro. The owner of Lazzaro’s Auto Body, he teamed up with “Hollywood” Joe Santoro to dominate the pro stock division in the early part of the 21^st century. Santoro recorded his first pro stock win on April 28, 2000 and when he finally moved up to the sportsman division in 2005, he had 26 career wins.

Duell eventually returned to racing, also racing for the Lazzaro team for a while, and chalked up his first pro stock victory on June 16, 2006.

Yetman got his first pro stock victory at Malta on April 17, 2009 and ended Santoro’s 17-year reign at the top of the pro stock win list when he picked up his 27^th career win on April 22, 2022.

Now it’s Duell turn. Oddly enough, his win total includes a victory by disqualification. On May 22, 2009, he finished second to Yetman, who was later disqualified for having an illegal distributor.

What makes the climb to the top of the all-time win list more memorable is that Duell did it in a chassis of his own design. He and crew chief Dave Madej began developing the Twister chassis in 2013 and the chassis has produced a lot of wins since then.

An engine change during the week helped Duell get over the hump.

“I felt confident tonight,” he said last Friday. “My other motor was sick last week. It was wisping smoke, so we took it out for a compression test, and it failed. I had another Hunt motor that I was going to put in a new car, so I put that motor in this car. I knew I was going to have good power, and I put in my Oswego setup.”

And he needed every bit of that horsepower. He was sitting third when a yellow came out on lap 23 of the 25-lap feature. “When the caution came out with three to go, I knew it was either going to kill me, or give me a shot,” he said.

Duell jumped into second on the restart, continued to work the low side and ran side-by-side with leader Shane Henderson. On the last lap, Duell had a slight advantage going through the third turn, and then slid up coming out of four to break Henderson’s momentum and get the milestone win.

“I knew I had to move up a little bit,” said Duell. “I could get under him, but I couldn’t pull away. He ran me clean those last couple of laps. I really thought he was going to come ripping around me again on the last lap.”

Last Friday’s win marked the first time since 2017 that Duell has made three trips to victory lane in the same season.

Now that he’s got No. 29, there are other goals. “I’d really like to get to 30,” he said. “That’s a nice round number.”

He’d also like to get into victory lane at Super DIRT Week in Oswego. He won the pole last year, but mechanical problems dropped him to 25^th in the final running order. His best finish at Oswego was a second (to his nemesis Yetman) in 2017.

As I usually do during most of the conversations I have with Duell, I again brought up the concept of retirement.

“No. We’ve got a new car ready to come out next year,” he said. “Besides, my wife would kill me.”

And there’s always the Ghost of Albany-Saratoga Past.

“It wouldn’t surprise me to see Yetman show up with a car and try to get the record back,” he laughed.

MORE FROM MALTA

Adam Pierson must be carrying a horseshoe or a four-leaf clover or some other good luck charm with him when he comes to Malta on Friday nights. Pierson chalked up his third modified win of the season last Friday, getting a big break on the first lap when he just missed getting involved in a multi-car wreck in the first turn.

That wreck helped him move from 15^th to seventh in the field, with no laps complete, and he held off Mike Mahaney to get the win.

“I’d be happy with one win. To get three is really something,” he said in victory lane after the win. “And it’s not like I’m starting on the front row every time. I’ve been starting 14^th, 15^th. The car has been really good for the last couple of months.”

Demetrios Drellos was involved in that first-lap incident, and as the cars sat in the first turn, with the front end of Marc Johnson’s car sitting on the hood of Drellos’ car, it looked like Drellos might be done for the night. But as soon as his car was towed into the pits, Drellos’ team, with some other teams assisting, made the necessary repairs, which included replacing the carburetor, and Drellos got back out without losing a lap. He finished ninth, allowing him to maintain the modified point lead over Matt DeLorenzo.

Peter Britten was a no-show last Friday. Britten cut a tendon in his hand three weeks ago and needed surgery. Max McLaughlin filled in for him for the night of make-up features on Aug. 9, and Britten was back behind the wheel of his car on Aug. 11, finishing ninth. But three days later, he posted on Facebook, “I have tried to keep pulling through and continue racing throughout this, but it has become evident that I need to sit out and get healthy again before problems get worse.”

Scott Towslee was absent from the limited sportsman ranks last Friday, serving the first week of a two-week suspension for actions on the track and in the pits on Aug. 11.

Tim Hartman Jr. and Andrew Buff won the dual sportsman features last week, allowing Buff to keep his 39-point lead in the race for the championship. Here’s an interesting statistic. In the 15 weeks of racing at Malta, Buff and Hartman have only been in the same feature six times, and Hartman has finished ahead of Buff in four of those features.

Speaking of Buff, he’s been on fire lately. In addition to his win at Malta, he also won the first two races in the DIRTcar Sportsman Championship Series, first at Canandaigua on Aug. 16 and then at Glen Ridge Motorsports last Sunday.

Friday’s card at Albany-Saratoga will include the CRSA Sprints.

AROUND THE TRACKS

Wow. Ken Tremont Jr. can’t catch a break. Lebanon Valley ran a 50-lap modified feature last Saturday night, following a rainout the previous week. Tremont was leading on lap 30, which is the normal distance for a modified feature, but ran into mechanical issues five laps later and pulled into the pits, leaving him winless in 2023.

What the heck is going on with these first-lap pileups? Marc Johnson was in the middle of the mess at Malta, but bounced back to finish fifth. He wasn’t so lucky at the Valley on Saturday, getting knocked out for the night in another first-lap fiasco.

And how about Olden Dwyer? He was involved in first-lap pileups in both the big block and small block features at the Valley, never completing a lap!

Hartman Jr. chalked up his fifth win of the year at the Valley in one of the sportsman features, and Connor Crane, the point leader at Albany-Saratoga, won one of the limited sportsman features.

Mahaney won Wednesday’s make-up DIRTcar 358 race at Airborne Speedway in Plattsburgh. That came on the heels of a sixth-place run in the Super DIRTcar Series Summer Nationals at Ransomville on Tuesday. Pierson finished fourth at Ransomville, his second top-five finish in the series this season.