Rowe running away from the field

Did we just watch Ben Rowe clinch his 4th PASS North Series championship?
After Rowe went out and won his heat race, he entered the Pepsi Racing 75 at Thompson International Speedway last Saturday night with a 28-point lead over Johnny Clark in the standings. Rowe won the race, Clark had a flat tire that caused him to crash into the turn one wall and Rowe extended an already sizeable lead at the top of the PASS world.

Mike Rowe finished 3rd after starting dead last in the 24-car field with clutch problems in his heat race. Unofficially, Ben Rowe leads his father by 35 points with 8 races remaining. Clark dropped to 4th with a second-straight 16th-place finish, behind Richie Dearborn some 58 points out of the lead.

"It's never too early," Rowe said of watching the points battle. "Johnny and my father are really close. Johnny had his bad luck, and I'm sure we'll have ours."

Neither Clark nor Mike Rowe was willing to concede anything yet, even though with each finishing position separated by only 2 points it's incredibly hard to make up serious ground in the PASS standings.

"We'll just keep plugging away and whatever happens, happens," Clark said. "You want to go out and win races. We had a good chance at a 2nd or 3rd place run tonight, but we cut a tire down and there was nothing I could do except spin the car around and hit the wall.

"I don't know. We've been pretty good with pretty much a similar setup to this up until to this part of the season. I don't know why it didn't work here, but, man, nothing we were doing here was working."

Mike Rowe said his team is only focused on one thing -- catching his son.

"We just want to win races," Mike said. "Benji's out front and winning, so that's bad for us."

Still, Ben Rowe doesn't think he's locked up anything yet. He knows that several teams are capable of getting on a roll.

"We've just got to keep doing what we're doing and keep digging" he said. "This point last year, we were so far behind but we won the last 3. Hopefully we'll get on another win streak."