CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — A racing vacation to California ultimately took Bo Partain straight to the IMCA record book.
His mid-July sweep of Summer Shootout features at Barona Speedway was part of an eight in a row win streak that made the Casa Grande speedster the first driver from Arizona to earn the EQ Cylinder Heads Southern Region championship for IMCA Sunoco Stock Cars.
“I did not plan to run for the region, not at all. We had three races left, somebody called me and told me ‘Hey, you’re leading regional points,” said Partain, who wrapped up 2024 two months later with a win at home track Central Arizona Raceway. “I hadn’t even looked at ’em. I had no idea.”
“I just bounced around this season and raced to have fun,” he explained. “My wife Tina and I had decided to race Barona, which is a fun little track for sure, spend a couple days on the beach and go deep sea fishing while we were over there in California and then come back home.”
Partain made the most of just 27 starts in The Class Too Tough To Tame, more than doubling his career win total with 14 feature wins.
He was consistent but winless through his first nine January outings, eight of them during the IMCA.TV Winter Nationals, then won six of his next 10 outings before running away from his regional foes with eight straight checkers to clinch the crown.
That streak, incidentally, came on board a new 2024 DeVilbiss Chassis built in just two weeks and which replaced a ride wrecked in mid-March at Casa Grande.
“It’s definitely cool to be the first one from Arizona to do it and definitely cool to have it on your resume,” said Partain, who accomplished the feat without bonus points from any track championships and despite breaks of a month and a half and two months when most tracks close to home shutter for the summer.
“We haven’t really chased points the last three years,” he added. “I made a run in 2021 in the Northern SportMods, came up second nationally and kind of got burned out there. Up until those last three years, I was driving 11 hours on Friday to race in Utah, then driving 11 hours back home so I could make it to our Saturday night track here in Arizona.”
“Now with more tracks being IMCA sanctioned in Arizona, it’s much easier.”
Partain made a combined 69 Stock Car and Friesen Performance IMCA Northern SportMod starts in 2021. His 39 starts in those two divisions this season – Partain was a five-time winner in 11 SportMod outings – were his most since.
“It’s very difficult to race two cars. You definitely have to have good pit help,” he said. “Without that, you’ll struggle. It’s hard to adapt car to car and if you get torn up in the heat, it can be a challenge to get back on the track for the feature.”
He started his racing career in 2007 in a local pure stock class and was a pioneer in the X-Mod class that morphed into the IMCA Northern SportMods.
Partain, the all-time Arizona leader in that division with 52 career feature wins, has yet another claim to fame as a special Stock Car series champion in Iowa.
“It gets hot here in the summer so the last three or four years I’ve run the Midwest Madness Tour,” he said. “We were lucky enough to win it last year and then they had all that crazy rain this year. It’s every Arizona drivers’ dream to move to Iowa and race.”