DOE RUN, Mo. — Cannon McIntosh and the Keith Kunz/Curb-Agajanian Motorsports team are heating up at exactly the right time of the season.
With a summer break in the schedule nearing, McIntosh, 21, scored his fourth feature win of the season with the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota Thursday night at Doe Run Raceway, taking the lead from Michael Pickens early and never looking back en route to his ninth series victory and second in two races.
The win increases his lead in the championship standings up to 154 points over his KKM teammate Ryan Timms with 13 of the 30 scheduled races complete. He’s now a perfect 13-for-13 in top-five finishes this season – 10 of which have been on the podium.
Thursday’s program was also run in conjunction with the POWRi National Midget League, making for his second career win in Xtreme Outlaw-POWRi Challenge Series events.
With his fourth Xtreme Outlaw main event win of the season in the can — tying his personal record from last year — McIntosh is beginning to take the form he showed during the first half of 2023 driving for his family-run team. But he made the move back to KKM this past winter and has been increasingly more of a threat for the win every night — essential in his quest to capture his first national Midget series championship.
“I think it’s just Keith and I’s relationship, when it comes to the race cars, is just getting better and better with every race,” McIntosh said. “As good as we looked tonight, I feel like we keep better and better every race.”
When the green flag waved, McIntosh wasted no time in making a charge for the leaders, picking off Tyler Edwards for second on lap three and setting his sights on leader Pickens.
A caution flag was thrown one lap later for Edwards who spun and collected Jade Avedisian in turn four. On the restart, McIntosh lined up behind Pickens and took first crack at a slide job in turns three and four on lap five. Pickens crossed him over to retake the spot down the frontstretch, but McIntosh returned the favor in turns one and two. Pickens threw one more slider in turn three and but washed way up the track out of turn four, allowing McIntosh to take the spot for good.
“Pickens was, obviously, a little bit harder to do; he had more momentum built up,” McIntosh said. “But, I was able to eventually just build enough momentum to get by him there. I know it was probably a close slider, but no contact, which is always a good thing.”
“It got trickier as the race went on,” Pickens said. “It was really a race of understanding the best place to put your car and not make mistakes and trip yourself up. Cannon obviously did that the best.”
Once he got to the lead, it was all McIntosh out front. For the next 25 laps, he put on a clinic around the sixth-mile, opening up a gap as large as three seconds in lapped traffic as the laps wound down.
From seventh on the starting grid, Zach Daum was making his climb toward the front, and by lap 11 had taken second from Pickens with a pass in turns one and two. While Daum tried to run McIntosh down later in the race, he was unable to find the speed to keep up as McIntosh’s gap grew in traffic.
“First thing is having a really good car under you, which I had an amazing piece under me; it was lights-out,” McIntosh said. “From that point out, it was just kind of my job in finding the line early, and I think I found it pretty quick. After that, it was just kind of finding the fine line between how hard I could drive it and not going too far.”
In the closing laps, Daum appeared to be settled in for runner-up finish until a rear-end component broke with only two laps left. The 2022 series champion pulled to the infield and gave up his spot to Pickens, who crossed the stripe with a second-place finish in his first appearance with Xtreme since 2022.
“I probably struggled a little bit through the midway point, figured a few things out and maybe got a tick better at the end,” said Pickens.
Coming home third was 16-year-old national midget rookie Trevor Cline, who was the fast qualifier with a track record lap of 10.784 seconds.
The finish:
Feature (30 Laps): 1. 71K-Cannon McIntosh[3]; 2. 54-Michael Pickens[1]; 3. 55-Trevor Cline[9]; 4. 21K-Karter Sarff[5]; 5. 67-Ryan Timms[15]; 6. 19AZ-Hayden Reinbold[14]; 7. 14S-Tyler Edwards[2]; 8. 97K-Kale Drake[4]; 9. 40-Chase McDermand[12]; 10. 16-Kyle Jones[16]; 11. 67K-Ashton Torgerson[11]; 12. 97-Gavin Miller[18]; 13. 98-Elijah Gile[10]; 14. 3N-Jake Neuman[20]; 15. 43-Gunnar Setser[8]; 16. 1K-Brayton Lynch[21]; 17. 66-Jayden Clay[22]; 18. 7U-Zach Daum[7]; 19. 71-Jade Avedisian[6]; 20. 77-Joe Wirth[13]; 21. 56D-Mitchell Davis[17]; 22. 50-Daniel Adler[19]
