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SPORTS

Teen driver nears a State Park Speedway sweep

Tim Johnson
USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin
Derek Kraus, left, became the youngest driver to win the Larry Detjens Memorial at State Park Speedway last Saturday.

RIB MOUNTAIN - Derek Kraus is two-thirds of the way to completing a season sweep of the memorial races at State Park Speedway this year.

The 14-year-old Stratford native became the youngest driver to win the Larry Detjens Memorial last Saturday less than two months after he finished first in the Flip Merwin Memorial at the speedway. The Wayne "Lodi" Lodholz Memorial race is set for Aug. 25.

The Rib Mountain track's next scheduled event is Aug. 11 with qualifying starting at 6 p.m.and racing at 7 p.m..

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Tim Sauter won all three Memorial races in 2014 and is the only driver to complete the sweep of the the three features in a season. The inaugural Lodholz Memorial was in 2009.

Sauter won two of the three races in 2015.

Kraus took the lead for good with 23 laps of the 125-lap race remaining in the Detjens Memorial and held on for the victory.

“It feels really good to win this race,” Kraus said in a State Park Speedway media release. “It’s one of the toughest tracks in the country, there’s little grip and it feels great to race against all these great people and win.

“I knew it was going to get a little dicey there in the later stages — everyone is losing patience and it’s getting towards the end of the race,” Kraus said. “I just stayed calm and wanted to have really good restarts and it felt really good to win this race.”

Mark Mackesy, who won the race in 2006 and '12, overcame some issues early in the race and rallied back to finish second behind Kraus . Sauter was third.

“The hard part is to keep my temper and not get too hot,” Mackesy said in the speedway media release. “I have a bad temper.  It's hard to believe, but I do. The guys just kept telling me, 'Keep calm. You got a good car, it’ll come to you.' So I just kept running it, trying to be smooth and not take the tires off of it.

"We had tires at the end, which was nice,"  Mackesy said. "In this race at this track usually at the end of 125 you got nothing left, so it worked out pretty well.”