Garber steams toward repeat
When the Inland Northwest Super Stock Association kicked off its campaign in April, defending champion David Garber had one thing on his mind – repeating the feat.
As the green flag drops on Saturday’s 100-lap main event at Stateline Speedway, Garber will be that much closer to realizing his goal. With his worst finish an 11th-place run during the Friday portion of the Idaho 200 weekend, Garber has collected two wins and shown consistency throughout the summer to bring his Pend Oreille Mechanical race team to this point.
No driver has repeated as INSSA champion. Thanks to solid driving and hard work from his dedicated crew, Garber can claim that feat at the conclusion of this weekend’s event.
Coming off a seventh-place finish in last weekend’s Montana Raceway Park late-model season championship, Garber is thankful for the support from several Kalispell, Mont., businesses that got his team to the track. Despite the subpar effort, it turned out to be a tremendous learning experience for this weekend, he said.
“We had gotten into some trouble up there in August during their Can-Am race, thought we had it fixed when we went down to Yakima and ran in the ARCA show during Labor Day – only to find out last weekend that we still had something wrong with the car,” Garber said. “I’m lucky we did go up to Kalispell and found the things that were wrong with our shock and the rear end, because that may have cost us this weekend at the INSSA race.”
Two weeks ago, Garber ran Russ Osborne’s Pontiac in the season finale for ICAR and picked up the win at Mission Valley Speedway. With all the racing he’s done in 2008, Garber has had fun helping others and running a variety of tracks.
“We hot-lapped Russ’ car and were fast right out of the box,” he said. “Then it rained and we came back the next day and even though Nathan (Fleury, the 2008 ICAR champion) had us beat in qualifying and my dad (Bruce) had a good run, it turned out to be a heck of a race and was a lot of fun to do.”
Garber expects this weekend to be as much fun as the ICAR race, with his brother and nephew entered in the 100-lap INSSA finale.
While INSSA’s season may be ending, the fall calendar is in full swing.
“I’ve got plans to run both the Yakima Fall Classic in two weeks and the Las Vegas Fall Classic in November, so this weekend we want to protect our championship and the win but also save our car for those races,” Garber said. “We usually run two of the big late-model main events at Yakima, but I know that if it hurts my sponsors and the chance to go to Vegas we may just run the Limited Late Model race on Saturday night. I think we’ve lined up everything we need to go to Las Vegas, but I still have a few details to work out.”
Stateline Speedway hosts the INSSA championship and the season finale for the Northwest Pro 4 Truck Series and the local Hobby Stock class. For more information, www.raceidaho.com