In order to win the inaugural CARS Super Late Model Tour championship, Kyle Grissom had to most likely win Saturday’s race and hope that Cole Timm had some bad luck to make up that nine-point deficit.

Fortunately for Timm, neither of those things happened.

Grissom finished second and Timm finished seventh, which clinched the inaugural CARS Super Late Model Tour championship for Timm by six points.

“This is just amazing,” said Timm.  “It probably won’t sink in until maybe Monday.  It just feels so amazing.”

Christopher Bell and the Kyle Busch Motorsports team celebrate the Hickory CARS Tour race victory. (Speed51.com photo)

Christopher Bell completely dominated the 150-lap affair to take home the win, but there was a point in time when it seemed like Grissom would be able to get by Bell’s No. 51 machine.  At the same time, the handling on Timm’s machine started to go away and perhaps could have taken the championship away along with it.

“As soon as we started losing spots that’s when we started to not really worry too much, but we started really paying attention to the points situation,” said Timm.

Midway through the race Timm had his biggest scare.  Quin Houff went for a spin off turn four right in front of the field and two other cars were collected.  Those two cars happened to be right in front of Timm, who just narrowly avoided a major disaster.

“My spotter didn’t even see it happen,” Timm explained.  “I didn’t see it happen until I saw the caution lights.  I really thought we’d be in it for a second, but luckily I was able to slow up in time and get around it.”

Grissom did all he could up at the front of the field to try to win the championship, but he said he knew coming into the night that it would be extremely difficult.

“Really coming into the race I knew that it was a pretty big margin,” said Grissom.  “It was kind of a hope and a prayer to get the championship.  I knew that (Timm) was going to have to have some kind of problem.   Really I just wanted to win the race.  We came close but we obviously didn’t have enough there for the 51 (Bell).  We were able to race him a little bit but on that long run he was just a little better than we were.”

Bell said the same thing in victory lane after his celebration died down.  But even though Bell was better on the long run, the long run was not what he had as the caution flag waved with just 10 laps to go.

“We were better on the long runs, but they were probably better than us on the short runs,” said Bell.  “That was not what I wanted to see was a 10-lap shootout.  Thankfully we had enough in the tank where I could hang on.”

Bell held off Grissom by six-tenths of a second to score the victory.  Josh Berry, William Byron and Zane Smith completed the top five.

Speed51.com will have plenty more from the CARS Racing Tour finale including interviews from the winners and champions on the 51 Network.

To see an on-demand replay of Saturday’s Trackside Now coverage presented by JET Tools and Liberty University, click here.

– By Rob Blount, Speed51.com Regional Editor – Twitter: @RobBlount

– Featured Photo Credit: Nicholas Stearns

CARS Super Late Model Tour

Hickory Motor Speedway, Newton, North Carolina

Unofficial Results

It’s Timm’s Time for a CARS Super Late Model Title