Western Springs regular Brad Mosen has finished in the top ten at the Pepsi/Mt. Dew USAC Midget Nationals at Knoxville Raceway, Iowa, last weekend. After a rain affected Saturday the B-Main and the main A Feature event were both rescheduled to the Sunday evening.

Both Brad Mosen and Michael Pickens were due to race but Pickens failed to show. This was Mosen’s first drive in the states after his try-out drive at the scheduled Kokomo meeting a week prior had been rained out.

A top 10 finish in the A Feature main event on Saturday night has proved an auspicious start to the 18 year old’s inaugural speedway racing season.

Mosen had been scheduled to race at Kokomo, Indiana on the 25th May, just 4 days after arriving in the but the race meeting was cancelled due to bad weather.

The Keith Kunz Motorsport team, who has contracted Mosen to drive in the prestigious USAC Midget series entered 4 drivers including the young Aucklander in the 2 day long USAC Nationals at the famous half mile track.

The Knoxville Nationals event is not an easy place to start a racing career. Twice as big as Mosen’s home track, Western Springs Speedway in Auckland, the Knoxville track is very fast and unforgiving. Mosen spent Thursday’s practice session getting to grips with extra speed and his new car.

“It’s real fast to start with but you get used to it and it goes from scary fast to fun fast pretty quick said Mosen. The car is roomier in the cockpit area than my car in NZ and the engine is a bigger capacity so the car has more power.”

18 year old Mosen proved a crowd favourite after dominating Friday’s hot lap session setting the fastest lap time of the night.

Although Mosen failed to qualify through the heat races, for the preliminary Friday night feature, he finished second in the B Main repercharge to secure a start in position 22 on the 11th row of the grid for the Feature race.

A Tracy Hines crash on lap two brought the red light on and on the races re-start Mosen went high on the track, bounced off the cushion and flipped bringing his Friday night preliminary race to a premature end.

Another satisfying hot laps session saw Mosen with the 4th quickest lap time overall on Saturday. Mosen started the second heat race in grid 5 and drove well to finish 2nd to Californian Johnny Rodriguez and qualified directly into the A Feature.

The skies over Iowa’s famous track had been threatening rain all evening and finally opened up and the final races were postponed until the Sunday night.

Mosen’s finish in the heat racing the night prior had put him 12th on the start grid on a surprisingly dry track.

“The track was really dry and slick early in the night and I was a bit worried about getting the car hooked up said Mosen but the team guys set the car up and once I got started and figured out a good line on the slick track I adjusted the shocks and we were going forward!”

In an incident filled feature race Mosen lost position on a re-start and had a standout drive from the rear of the field up into 8th position.

“All the drivers were going straight to the bottom on the starts, the middle of the track was gone and I stayed up high which seemed to work”.

Mosen eventually finished the 25 lap championship feature event in 9th place two spots behind team-mate Jay Drake. His drive quickly endeared him to team principal Keith Kunz who was impressed by Mosen’s first time on dirt.

“This is just the beginning for Brad and Keith Kunz Motorsport, he has a real future here with our team, said Kunz. This weekend he has shown what he can do and the boy has fantastic potential”.

Pepsi/ Mt. Dew USAC Midget Nationals Championship Feature 

Mosen and team mates Jay Drake, Darren Hagen, Cory Kruseman and Bryan Clauson will all head to the 3/8 mile Lake Ozark track on Friday 9th June for their next USAC series race meeting.

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