NISSAN MOTORSPORTS | INFINITI PRO SERIES : Rd.10 Pikes Peak 100

Jeff Simmons surveyed the landscape on the first lap of the Pikes Peak 100, made a calculated move the next time by and then checked out at Pikes Peak International Raceway. No one could rein him in.

Pole sitter Travis Gregg exited Turn 2 as the leader, but it didn’t last long as Simmons sized him up and made the pass entering Turn 1 of Lap 2. Gregg’s crew wasn’t too worried, telling him to “let Simmons burn off his tires.” But Simmons, driving the No. 24 Team ISI Dallara/Infiniti/Firestone, kept up the pace and went on to a 4.8765-second victory over a hard-charging Nick Bussell in a caution-free race on the 1-mile tri-oval.

It was the second victory of the season – both on 1-mile ovals -- for Simmons, the pole sitter at this high-altitude facility in 2003 and ’04 with a best result of runner-up. He wasn’t looking for another second place.

“It was great, one of the best cars I’ve ever had,” said Simmons, who started alongside Gregg on the front row and topped the morning/final practice session with a quick lap of 152.390 mph.

“Everybody at Kenn Hardley Racing and Team ISI did a great job. Tom Wood, my teammate, had an awesome car at the end (finishing fourth). He was closing in on me. I didn’t want to push too hard. I wish we could have given him that car earlier in the weekend, because we could have had the top two.

“I’m so excited for Kenn Hardley Racing and Team ISI. It’s been a storybook weekend, except for missing the pole position. I was able to get out there, get through traffic pretty well.”

Bussell, who started ninth in the No. 9 Vision Racing car, recorded his series-best finish. He passed Gregg on Lap 84 for second and began to close in on Simmons. But he ran out of laps.

“We struggled since we got here,” said Bussell, whose previous best was third at St. Petersburg and Milwaukee. “In qualifying, I didn’t want to risk the car. So we qualified ninth, way off the pace. Basically, it was a two-lap practice run. We found some things last night that weren’t quite right, like the shocks. We made some changes this morning. We fixed a bad shock and went out this morning and it was 10 times better.

“For thinking it would be our worst race of the year and now having my best finish, I’m pretty happy.”

Gregg inched closer to Wade Cunningham in the championship race with a third-place finish, but didn’t have the car to challenge Simmons.

“At the start of the race, we had a big push,” said Gregg, who won from the pole a week earlier at Kentucky Speedway.

“I couldn’t hold it down and Jeff got around me. Then the car just went away a little bit, got a little loose.

“We’ll take a third. We finished ahead of Wade, so we picked up some points. A caution probably wouldn’t have helped.”

Cunningham, who placed fifth, has 371 points to Gregg’s 350 with the next event the road course at Infineon Raceway.

“I got a good run at the start,” said Cunningham, who recorded a series-record 10^th consecutive top five. “I thought I could get to second, and then I played it a bit conservative. Once we got behind Tom Wood, we followed him for 20-, 30-, maybe 40-odd laps and then we developed this huge vibration in the rear end. I was trying to drive as slow as I could, but race it at the same time. It was a hard trade-off. I think we were a bit quicker at the start of the race, but then we had quite a bit of a gap toward the end. So I had to come home fifth, but there isn’t much I could do about it.”