MERRILL, Mich. — Veteran Michigan winged sprint car driver Dustin Daggett will be chasing his third Great Lakes Super Sprints Presented by PERFIT & ARP championship this season.
Daggett is a historical leader for the Great Lakes Super Sprints. Not only did the Portland, Michigan native win the first ever event on June 17th, 2016, but he holds the statistical lead in several categories as the series prepares for the 10th season of racing.
Daggett is the all-time leader in Fast Time Awards with 24, the next closest is Phil Gressman with 16; Daggett holds a 20 marker advantage in Heat Race Wins with 61, Chase Ridenour is the next closest; and thanks to his August win at Crystal last season, he pulls two wins further away in the all-time feature winner stat as well.
Since the first win in 2016, Daggett has pulled together 25 other featuring winning performances, just two better than fellow two-time GLSS Champion Jared Horstman. Max Stambaugh, Phil Gressman, Randy Hannagan, and Ryan Ruhl are the only other drivers with double-digit wins out of 40 different winners all-time.
As the legitimacy of the Great Lakes Super Sprints has blossomed in 10 years of racing, so too has the competition. To win a feature with GLSS requires near perfection from the first time the car sees the race track until the car rolls across the scale and is officially declared a winner. The challenge to win is what makes earning a championship so special.
“I’d kind of like to have seen the young me against these guys,” Daggett said with a laugh. “I’d have to say the competition has gotten better; of course, there’s more serious people involved in it. The drive in the other racers to win is much more intense than it was even five seasons ago.”
Despite Daggett becoming the veteran on the Great Lakes Super Sprints, he says the mentality and ability to win is still very much intact.
“We’re still going there to win,” Daggett said. “We’ve still got the ability to win, we showed it last year – inn more cases than just the two features we did win. There are multiple events I look back at that I probably should have won. It’s still the goal; to go for the championship.”
