Never having been at the track in Arizona where he won a race didn’t stop Estevan’s Aaron Turnbull from having success there.
Turnbull won the Karl Performance Arizona Modified Tour race on Feb. 17, winning the only race he entered at the Cocopah Speedway in Yuma, Ariz.
“It was kind of cool to go down there and beat them,” said Turnbull, who’d never been on any of the tour before. “I didn’t do the whole tour, I just flew down there for the last three nights of it… I think it’s only the second time they’ve done that tour.”
He’d never been to the track before and with some of the best modified drivers around, there were a few familiar faces in the event.
“Of the guys that were there, most of them run the Dakota tour,” said Turnbull, a part of racing royalty in Estevan. “I’ve raced against them before and there were quite a few guys from North Dakota there too.”
Turnbull led from start to finish in the 25-lap race and took the day’s title over Ricky Thornton, Jr., who won the Dakota Classic Modified Tour stop in Estevan last July after a rainy, stormy evening dampened the Estevan Motor Speedway. Estevan’s Kody Scholpp – third in the standings last year at EMS – also raced in the event.
Turnbull’s father Ed ran most of the races in the tour, which lasted 10 days in Arizona. In the other two races at Cocopah, Aaron finished second on the third day and ninth on the first day in the main feature races.
“I just flew down for part of it,” Aaron said. “In his trailer, he can fit three cars in it and so we put my car in there and pulled it out for the last three days when I got there.”
Once the summer tour is over, Aaron said he tried to get the car a bit better for the coming season.
“Usually I’m just putting some new panels on it and doing some maintenance on it is all I can do in the fall,” he said. “I didn’t have much to do, just go over everything and make sure it was 100 per cent.”
Turnbull isn’t in every race in his hometown but did enough to finish in the top five three times and earn 110 points in the 2017 EMS season in the modifieds class, good for 19th place overall. He’ll be back for the 2018 season, although not full time.
“We’ve got a late Model 2 that we try to run all the big shows with the modifieds, and kind of get to the late modifieds shows in North Dakota. I don’t usually make it to every single race in Estevan anymore but I make it so as many as we can.”
When he can, Turnbull will race but with a young family and a new business severely curtailing what he can do, it’s not likely he’ll maintain the 50 races a year he used to.
For racing, “it’s a good thing,” he said. “It can keep the car a little fresher and keep up on maintenance rather than racing three times a week.”
