Casey Roderick Claims Third Bear in Dominating Alabama 200 Performance

Welcome back to the Alabama 200, Casey Roderick.

Roderick, making his first appearance in the event since 2019, scored his third career Alabama 200 victory in dominating fashion Saturday night at Montgomery Motor Speedway. Roderick finished more than four seconds ahead of runner-up Jake Finch and more than 12 seconds ahead of anyone else, with only seven cars finishing on the lead lap.

"It's always good to come back to Montgomery," Roderick told Racing America. "It's been a while since I've been here. I think 2020 is the last time I had raced here, in a Super. We used to run here all the time in the Show Me the Money Series, and it's good to be back and get another win first time out.

"It'll sink in after a few days. All these guys work really hard. They bring great cars to the race track for me and it makes my job a lot easier in practice, trying to make small changes to get a little bit better."

Perhaps the only hiccup of the night for Roderick came on a lap 35 restart. Roderick and Dylan Fetcho were on the front row for that restart, but made contact and fell into the back half of the top 10.

Nonetheless, Roderick methodically worked his way through the field before taking the lead for the final time on lap 91.

"It was interesting tonight with what happened on the first restart. Me and the 89 [of Fetcho] got together into one and it shuffled us back a bit. The car wasn't liking being in the traffic. I was having a hard time turning underneath people trying to pass them."

Jake Finch finished second in his first Pro Late Model appearance in several years, and his first as part of a new partnership with Ronnie Sanders in the famed No. 18.

"I feel like we were good the whole time. I haven't run a Pro Late in four years, so I feel like a little bit of it was driver, trying to figure out how hard I needed to run and stuff like that. Ronnie and the whole group got me dialed in at the end."

Finch couldn't help but notice the irony of driving the Ronnie Sanders machine to the second-place finish behind Roderick, who won the Alabama 200 in 2017 and 2018 with Sanders.

"Thought we were going to have one more caution there at the end. It's good to run behind Casey, congratulations to them. I think we'll be alright if we're following these guys.

"I'm super excited. It's funny, growing up and going to the race track, I was always watching Casey and Ronnie in this car. I get to drive this race car, same paint job and everything, and I've enjoyed it so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season."

Seth Christensen, last year's winner in the event, made a last-lap pass of Gavin Graham to secure a podium finish on Saturday.

"I'm really proud of the effort of these guys had. Ricky [Turner] had a really good car for me. I got in a couple of scuffles during the race, but it paid off coming through the field there. I'm just glad to be on the podium for the second year in a row. Hopefully, many more to come."

Perhaps one of Roderick's greatest threats for the win, Augie Grill, led 36 laps in the first half of the race. However, he was shown the black flag from the lead when the window net detached on his No. 43.

"An employee of mine had drilled a couple of holes in the window net bar," explained Grill. "I guess that made it too flimsy and it got to moving around and it popped them back out and unlatched itself. I'm shocked it took them as long to black flag me as it did.

Grill ultimately finished 15th, three laps down after losing laps under the green flag as his crew refastened the window net.

"Today was really good, just riding back there two laps down, not racing anybody almost made me wanted to park it. I was thinking maybe we'd get a lucky dog or something, and then it went green the rest of the way. Just bad circumstances."

-Photo credit: Will Bellamy, Racing America

60TH ALABAMA 200 UNOFFICIAL RESULTS