Jimmy Elliott in Victory Lane at Smoky Mountain.
Jimmy Elliott has been finding plenty of success on the tracks around east Tennessee lately. This past weekend, he scored a $2,000 win in the NeSmith Dirt Late Model Touring Series event at the 411 Motor Speedway on Friday night. He then followed that up with a 4th place effort for that series on the same track the next evening.
Earlier this season, the 25-year-old Cleveland, Tenn. driver earned a $1,000 first prize in the Crate Late Model feature at Smoky Mountain Speedway during that track’s NDRL weekend.
“I like running the crates right now because there’s more big money races around here,” Elliott explained. “You don’t have to worry because your motor is legal everywhere. But if you go to steelhead, sometimes your motor isn’t legal for this track or that track. We’re just going to focus on crate racing for the bigger money races.”
With that success and the added focus on bigger races, Elliott plans on hitting the road more often in 2014. The added travel was part of his plan anyway, but the closing of his home race track in Cleveland will further add to time spent on the highway.
“We were going to start travelling some this year and focusing on some bigger races,” Elliott declared. “If we weren’t racing anyway far off we’d go there(Cleveland), but it won’t affect us as much as it will the local people. We’re going to race as many times as we can race. I’d race four times a week if we could.”
When he doesn’t have a more lucrative event to go to, Elliott plans to take his CVR Race Car to the tracks that are closest to home in hopes of finding an edge over the competition.
“We’ll probably go to Boyd’s and might even go to North Georgia some,” he said. “And we like going to Ray Cook’s track over at Tri-County. When we’re not going to big races we’re just going to go somewhere and test new stuff out to see if we can get better.”
For Elliott, racing is a way of life. And his progression through the ranks is something he hopes to continue.
“I’ve been raised up in racing all my life. I’ve probably been racing six years, but this is my second full year racing crates. I used to race Mini Stocks and we won a lot of those races so I was just ready to move up and look for a new challenge. And maybe some time sooner or later we might run some super stuff. But for now, we’re just going to try to focus on this and get it done.”
