Dave Davis Motorsports Team Makes Improvements, Sets Sights On ’12
DOVER, Del. – If there’s any driver on the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East that didn’t want to see the season end last weekend at Dover International Speedway, it was Cody Hodgson.
Hodgson finished 16th in the season-ending Dover 150, an impressive effort for the rookie who was forced to pit under the green flag for a flat tire. After being among the fastest of the 33 entries in both final practice and qualifying, some good old-fashioned bad luck took the No. 03 Ocala Gran Prix Dodge out of contention for a win early in the main event.
Still, Hodgson – who qualified 10th – was happy about the way the team performed in spite of the final result.
“We were really fast. During the race, we had a car that was for sure capable of winning,” said Hodgson, 19, of Escalon, Calif. “We were running seventh on one of the restarts when somebody jumped it behind me while the guy in front of me missed a shift or something. I got hit in the left rear, and it caused a leak in the tire.
“We had to pit under green, and that put us in the back on just about every restart. In 10 laps or so, we were back running with the cars in the Top-10, but then it seemed every time the yellow (flag) came out we were just never able to get into the Lucky Dog position and get a lap back. It was frustrating, but we had an awesome car. At the end of the race, we were two-tenths of a second faster than the leader.”
Hodgson finished the 12-race season 11th in the final K&N Pro Series East standings with five Top-10 finishes in his first full year in a full-size stock car after making the jump from go-karts. Though he finished sixth in the Sunoco Rookie of the Year standings, only three rookies finished ahead of him in the overall series standings, and he was among the series leaders in laps completed this season.
Those are the benchmarks that Hodgson views as the foundation for the future.
“I’m a racer. I want to do well. The results that I wanted weren’t there, but everybody I worked with – they were more than happy with me,” Hodgson said. “I never wrecked a car. We never had to rebuild a race car, I never wrecked an engine or a transmission or anything. All in all, it was a very good year – especially in my first full season of stock car racing right out of go karts.
“Hopefully this winter I’ll keep getting some seat time. That’s the biggest thing for me right now.”
Hodgson hopes to start getting that seat time next month in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series West season finale at Phoenix International Raceway. He then aims to run another full year in the K&N Pro Series East with Dave Davis Motorsports next season.
“I was kind of getting down on myself, because the results I wanted this year just weren’t there,” said Hodgson, who posted a season-best finish of eighth at Bowman Gray Stadium in June. “We struggled with the car, but we were not getting any better no matter what we tried. You start feeling like it’s you – but when we showed up at Dover, we tried some different things that really worked well. They were the kinds of things were we felt like we struggled all year. I showed what I could do with a good car. That was huge for me. It’s just a matter of getting that car right and getting it in position to do what we did in that last race.
“If we can do that, we’ll be really good next year.”