POLL RESULTS: No consensus on a Summer Showdown winner

There may not be a consensus about who’s going to win the eighth annual Summer Showdown at Evergreen Speedway this weekend, but there is one thing voters seem to agree on: They don’t think it will be the two-time defending champion.

This week’s Seattle Sidelines poll asked readers to predict who would win the Monroe racetrack’s premier race for Super Late Models — qualifying is scheduled for Saturday and the 200-lap main event is set for Sunday. Among the favorites are Colorado’s Preston Peltier, who won each of the past two years, California’s Derek Thorn, who’s leading the SLR Southwest Tour’s points standings, and Auburn’s Tyler Tanner, who’s dominating at Evergreen and attempting to become the first track regular to win Summer Showdown.

Those three, along with an “other” category, we included in the poll. Here’s the results:

POLL: Which driver is your pick to prevail at this weekend’s Summer Showdown at @EVGSpeedway? Full context, including a closer look at the contenders, here: https://t.co/kSW6eJIBB1

— Nick Patterson (@NickHPatterson) June 24, 2019

Add the two together and there’s no clear favorite, at least as far as the voters are concerned. Indeed, the option that received the most votes was “other,” which garnered 37 percent of the vote. Of the drivers listed, Tanner received the most votes at 28 percent, Thorn came in at 23 percent and Peltier drew 12 percent.

I don’t find this a surprising result. Given there are nearly 40 drivers entered in the race, betting on the field when there are only three individual options is the smart play. Because Twitter polls are limited to four answers, I decided to limit the options in both polls in order to maintain consistency. And there are plenty of other drivers, such as Texas’ Chris Davidson, Naches’ Tayler Riddle and many others, who have a chance of winning this.

But I am surprised at how little support Peltier received. Peltier has entered the race three times and easily could have won all three. In addition to his victories the past two years, he was leading late in the 2016 race when his battery died with six laps remaining. He’s proven he’s the favorite if he’s in the race, yet he received the fewest votes among the options by a definitive margin.

Among the three named drivers, Tanner received the most support, and I’m sure there will be a lot of fans Sunday who will be cheering him on. Evergreen is still awaiting its first local winner at Summer Showdown, and given that Tanner won four of the first five races at the track this season and has twice finished fourth at Summer Showdown, he would seem to represent the best chance at a local winner the track has seen in some time.