Fired Up: Ken Cassidy Jr. Finding Way Back To 2012 Form At Waterford With Another Mini Stock Win

WATERFORD – Over the first few weeks of the 2013 season at the Waterford Speedbowl the biggest question around the pits was, what happened to Ken Cassidy Jr.

Ken Cassidy Jr.

In 2012 Cassidy won nine of the first 10 Mini Stock events of the year at Waterford on the way to the division’s championship and a NASCAR short track national championship.

This year Cassidy opened the season winless over the first five races.

But when he did finally find his way back to victory lane, he turned the heat back up.

Cassidy won the 25-lap Mini Stock feature Saturday at the Waterford Speedbowl.

Garrett Denton of Hope Valley, R.I. was second and Wayne Burroughs Jr. of Oakdale third.

It was his fifth victory in the last eight Mini Stock features at the track.

“Back where we left off,” Cassidy said. “The car’s been getting better every week. We’ve been working on it every week to get it better. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, but we go back to what we know and what we had and it seems to work for us. But we always try to make it a little better.”

Cassidy went by Denton for the lead with six laps left and didn’t trail again.

Cassidy said the team is back in the form that brought them 12 victories in 2012.

“The car got beat up a little bit [early in the season] and once you start chasing stuff it’s like a never ending battle,” Cassidy said. “You’re constantly checking and changing stuff. Once you start changing one thing it seems like five things change on the car. So you’ve got to go back to square one and that’s what we did.

“But tires are a big factor. At the beginning of the year I was breaking in new tires and new tires and me just mix. Last year when I won nine out of the first 10 races that was on one set of tires. They were the golden set, I didn’t want to take them off. This year we struggled with tires and that was a little bit of our game.”