There were no repeats, and no former champions returning to the top as five drivers earned their first All Missouri Points titles in 2010.
The Late Model championship did stay in the same hometown though as Larry Jones of Eldorado Springs replaced fellow resident and 2009 champion Donnie Timmerman at the top of the list. Jones picked up five feature wins among his twenty-six top-five finishes this season to out-distance his competition by seventeen points. With a victory in the final race of the season on Thanksgiving weekend in Springfield, Justin Wells edged out the defending champion Timmerman by just one point to take the runner-up honors. Wells picked up ten checkered flags on Missouri ovals in 2010 while Timmerman tallied five feature victories. Veteran drivers Alan Vaughn and Ken Essary rounded out the top five.
Galena driver Jesse Stovall built up a solid lead in the Modified standings early in the season and his point total held up as he went Late Model racing around the south during August and September winning races in that division as well. Stovall accumulated sixteen feature wins in twenty-five top-fives and that was enough to edge out Jason Russell by just three points for the AMP championship. Russell, a regular competitor at Callaway and Lake Ozark, had eleven wins in twenty-seven top-fives. St. Louis area driver Rusty Griffaw finished in the third spot while Jackie Dalton and Johnny Fennewald tied for fourth. The top-five drivers in the final Modified point standings were separated by only seven markers, a very tight group given the five-point-scale system used. Two-time defending champion Tim Setzer finished eighth.
Another tight battle played out in the Sprint Car division as the top four in the final standings ended up being separated by just three points. Jonathan Cornell of Sedalia, behind three feature wins and twelve top-fives accumulated one more point than both Josh Fisher and Randy Martin while Joey Montgomery finished fourth just three points back. Jimmy Hurley completed the top five. Jesse Hockett had the lead and appeared to be headed for his second straight All Missouri Points Sprint Car title before his tragic death this Spring.
Vance Wilson emerged from the pack mid-season and stormed to a convincing championship in the Limited Late Model division. Wilson’s sixteen feature wins were seven more than anybody else could muster in the division in 2010 as he downed runner-up Jason Bodenhammer by twenty-five points. Bob Test had one less top-five (23) than the champion and finished in the third position while Brandon Imhoff and Jeff Herzog filled out the top five.
Three drivers appeared to be going “all out” for the 2011 Limited Modified All Missouri Points Championship as they could be found racing all over the western half of the state from Kansas City down to Monett. And, using the same point-scale for all divisions, these three drivers tallied more points than any of the champions in the other divisions. Colt Cheevers started strong and ran strong all year to hold off a late charge from defending champion Brad Smith to take the 2010 AMP title. Cheevers had forty top-five finishes on Show-Me State soil including twenty-one feature victories in a very impressive season. Smith had more wins in Missouri than anybody else this year with twenty-three among his thirty-three top five as he finished fifteen points behind Cheevers in second. J.C. Morton ran in the top-five thirty-five times and grabbed thirteen checkered flags on his way to a third-place finish in the final standings and both Eric Tinderholt and Kenny Harris were impressive as well topping the 100-point mark as they finished in fourth and fifth respectively.
The full standings for all five divisions can be found on the Points tab at PositivelyRacing.com.
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