inations. Jackson continued his stride after a hard-fought victory over respected competitor Ty Tutterow.
“ The WSOPM seems to be my nemesis,” Jackson confesses with a laugh.“ When I got past first round, that’ s always tough because I hadn’ t been out of the first round in the Winter Series. But when I beat Ty Tutterow, who’ s my hero and an awesome driver, I was like,‘ OK, this is our day.’ I’ ve won a lot of races, and I know how it goes, and I know what it feels like, and this is exactly what it feels like. Things just start happening, there’ s no pressure, everybody’ s having fun, and then you just start knocking them down. We just made smart decisions.”
In round three, the Georgia native squared off against NPK star Scott Taylor and secured the victory after Taylor broke on the starting line. Then, Jackson’ s semifinal face-off with Mike Bowman turned dramatic when a starting-line staging duel ensued for more than two minutes.
“ What we did is well within the rules. Those turbo guys are free to stage that car anytime they want to, and we’ ll follow them right in,” Jackson states.“ We don’ t burn people down. We respect the fact that it’ s hard for those guys to stage the car, but they have to respect the fact that it’ s hard for us to cut a light when they blink the bulb at us. So, we sat there for a minute.”
Although he survived the quarterfinals, Jackson confessed that he sat on the starting line too long, which led to his engine overheating and would later contribute to his demise in the final. Nonetheless, defeating Bowman’ s 3.675 in his turbocharged Chevelle with a 3.632 to advance felt like a significant hurdle to overcome.
“ We were expecting to get annihilated by Mike Bowman. So, we had a tune-up in there that I thought would go down the racetrack and not tear the engine up,” Jackson says.
In the final against Steve King and his“ Savage” 2018 Corvette, Jackson confidently believed he had the winning combination.
“ Those guys were pitted beside us, so we saw how hard they worked all weekend,” Jackson remembers.“ They got [ tuner ] Jon Salemi over there working on that thing. When you get to a final round, gloves are off because the car
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