MAC IS BACK: Cannon McIntosh Wins Xtreme Outlaw Series Finale at Southern Illinois Center
Race-long leaders Miller, Meseraull involved in incident with lapped traffic as McIntosh takes KKM to Victory Lane
DU QUOIN, IL (March 16, 2024) – The dry spell is over. Cannon McIntosh is once again in Victory Lane with the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota.
The 21-year-old from Bixby, OK, had been shut out of Victory Lane with the Series for 23-straight races, dating back to May of last year when he completed a sweep of the weekend Millbridge Speedway. But Saturday night was his night at the Southern Illinois Center, as he inherited the lead in the final laps – after an incident involving the top-two cars took them out of contention – and held on to win his sixth career Series Feature.
The win stood as McIntosh’s first in his return to Keith Kunz Motorsports (KKM), who he last drove for during the 2020 regular season and at the 2021 Chili Bowl Nationals.
“It feels amazing,” McIntosh said. “It feels like a long time since I’ve won. It feels a lot longer than it has been. It’s kind of been a journey all last year. Once we stopped winning, it was definitely dark times between switching teams and losing some relationships and that.
“But things circle back, and luckily, I feel like I’ve grown from a lot of losses in this timespan. It’s made me better as a driver, and I’m just thankful to be back in this position.”
Though McIntosh was victorious in the end, the majority of the race was controlled by front-row starters Joe B. Miller and Thomas Meseraull. The two open-wheel stars chased each other for the first 35 laps of the race, breaking only twice for cautions on Lap 4 and Lap 9.
After the caution periods, Miller – the polesitter – jumped out to a gap on Meseraull that grew nearly as large as a full second as the two began to break away from the field and enter lapped traffic. Inside and outside, Meseraull looked for any sliver of space to get by Miller but was unable to make the move.
That was until Lap 36, when Meseraull got a big run to the outside of Miller coming off Turn 4. Miller crossed the stripe first and entered Turn 1 hugging the inside berm. Meseraull swung it wide on the top lane through the corner and briefly took the lead out of Turn 2 as Miller was slowed-up by lapped cars in front of him.
As the two raced into Turn 3 nearly side-by-side, TJ Smith and Ethan Mitchell came together and flipped multiple times right in front of the leaders. Meseraull tried to evade on the outside but Smith came down on top of him. Miller locked-up and stalled on the bottom with Mitchell flipping in front of him as the red flag quickly came out.
All drivers were unharmed, but Smith, Mitchell and Meseraull were all towed off the track while Miller was ordered to restart from the tail of the field for his involvement in the incident as determined by race officials.
This incident handed the lead over to McIntosh, who was running in third place at the time.
“It didn’t matter to me, I just knew I was gonna be in whatever position was given to me,” McIntosh said. “Once I could hear them say I was the leader, I knew there wasn’t more than five laps to go, and I just had to execute, really.”
Now in control of the field with only five laps remaining, McIntosh began to devise his plan to keep the top spot.
“Once they said Ryan [Timms] was behind me, I knew he had probably been really good because he started pretty far back,” McIntosh said. “I knew I just couldn’t make any mistakes.
“[Timms] was obviously running a different line but Keith was basically telling me on the fence – stay on the bottom. It might not be better, but it’s gonna be hard for them to pass you if you hit your marks correctly.”
Ryan Timms had made the charge up to fourth by that time from his 12th-place spot on the starting grid and lined up to restart second, looking for a way to get by his KKM teammate.
“I thought I’d restart maybe fourth or fifth and then I heard over the PA I was restarting second,” Timms said. “I was definitely feeling good about it, especially with how fast I was up top in 3 and 4. But I knew it was going to be tough to beat Cannon if he just hit his marks on the bottom and didn’t make any big mistakes.”
Try as he may, however, Timms was unable to get by McIntosh in the end. McIntosh held off Timms’ challenges on the top and the bottom lanes to collect the $5,000 grand prize and the Series points lead by three points over Zach Daum.
“On that last lap, I just kinda went in full-send, wide-open on the top,” Timms said. “I really thought I was gonna get him. It seemed like to me we were side-by-side, at least in the middle of the corner and then he kinda pulled away going down the frontstretch.”
For the second night-in-a-row, Daum crossed the finish line third in the running order, this time coming in behind Timms. Jade Avedisian rebounded from her misfortunes on Friday night to finish fourth, while Trey Marcham crossed in fifth after starting 11th.
UP NEXT
The Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota returns to action in three weeks’ time for a two-day swing through Missouri – Friday, April 5 at US36 Raceway and Saturday, April 6 at Sweet Springs Motorsports Complex.
Tickets for both events are on sale now at XtremeOutlawSeries.com and will also be available at the gate on race day. If you can’t be there in person, stream every lap live on DIRTVision.
ABBREVIATED RESULTS (view full results)
Feature (40 Laps): 1. 71K-Cannon McIntosh[4]; 2. 67-Ryan Timms[12]; 3. 7U-Zach Daum[6]; 4. 71-Jade Avedisian[3]; 5. 32-Trey Marcham[11]; 6. 67K-Ashton Torgerson[7]; 7. 86-Shane Cottle[15]; 8. 25K-Taylor Reimer[21]; 9. 40-Chase McDermand[5]; 10. 06-Rylan Gray[19]; 11. 97-Gavin Miller[17]; 12. 51B-Joe B Miller[1]; 13. 2H-Nick Hoffman[9]; 14. 83-Will Armitage[20]; 15. 21K-Karter Sarff[18]; 16. 55-Trevor Cline[10]; 17. 56D-Mitchell Davis[14]; 18. 19AZ-Hayden Reinbold[22]; 19. 7X-Thomas Meseraull[2]; 20. 14S-Tyler Smith[13]; 21. 19M-Ethan Mitchell[16]; 22. 56-Tyler Edwards[8]
Sources: Jordan DeLucia, Xtreme Outlaw Series PR
Photo credit – Joe Grabianowski