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Roger Crockett's incredible year deserves recognition
Posted
at
4:39 pm
by Scott Whitmore
I received the following column today, Tuesday, and can't agree with it more. Roger Crockett should be named 360 Sprint driver of the year. Read on, and see if you don't agree.
By Shawn Miller
American Sprint Car Series Northwest Region
Roger Crockett should be the 360 sprint car driver of the year.
The 28-year-old second-generation racer from Medford, Ore., has picked up 22 feature victories, the prestigious track championship at the Cottage Grove Speedway in Cottage Grove, Ore., and the coveted American Sprint Car Series Northwest Region championship this season.
His statistics are almost as incredible as his recent journey.
It was approximately one year ago that Crockett, whose kidney function had declined dramatically to six percent, received a kidney transplant from his father, Brian. If not for the operation, the younger Crockett was literally weeks away from having to undergo dialysis for kidney failure.
However, the father-son duo, which has combined for more than 300 sprint car feature victories, walked out of the hospital within a week. Both are healthy, although Roger has to take a handful of pills every day for the rest of his life. In addition, he is forced to focus on a healthy diet and stay within driving distance of his doctor.
Crockett, who returned to the track with a renewed but unstable health this season, won eight more races than he had ever recorded in a previous year. His career-high 22 victories were amassed at six tracks in four states.
Included in those wins was an ASCS National Tour victory and the Silver Cup – one of the top 360 sprint car events in the northwest – at the Silver Dollar Speedway in Chico, Calif.
In fact, Crockett was the first non-ASCS National Tour member to claim a feature with the top 360 tour this season when he won at Grays Harbor Raceway in Elma, Wash., the site of the National Tour's first-ever race in the northwest.
If Crockett had been allowed to travel, he would have raced more across the country, including in the 360 Nationals in Knoxville, Iowa. However, because organs are unstable in the first year after a transplant, Crockett was told to stay within an arm's distance of his medical specialists.
So Crockett made the most of his opportunities to pilot a race car.
In winning the track championship at the Cottage Grove Speedway, he never finished outside the top four, including two ASCS National Tour races.
Crockett won a driver-high five Northwest Region races en route to the series championship. He has claimed 10 of the 30 career Northwest Region events, which is seven more than any other driver.
Crockett is up to 130 career feature victories. He's raced for more than 15 years across the United States and without the physical resources that the average driver utilizes. A winner of multiple track and series championships, Crockett has established himself as the premier sprint car driver in the northwest.
For what he accomplished this season, overcoming a kidney transplant and winning nearly 50 percent of the races he entered, Crockett has earned the 360 sprint car driver of the year.
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