Sellers eyes good finish in East Series race at SoBo

Peyton Sellers certainly hopes that there truly is no place like home.

Coming back to the track he grew up at, Sellers returns to South Boston Speedway tonight, along with the rest of the Camping World East Series, for the running of the Strutmasters.com 150 at 7 p.m. And while the stop may be just like any other for the rest of the series drivers, the opportunity to drive in front of the fans who cheered him on through Late Model national and track championships makes this race special for Sellers.

That, and the fact that Sellers might never get a better chance to make up ground in the points standings than at a track he knows so intimately. It’s a home field advantage that the Danville native is more than ready to take advantage of.

“I feel just like Virginia Tech playing at home,” Sellers said. “Yeah, it’s still a 100-yard field, but having that crowd around you and the excitement is pretty indescribable.

“I would hope I’d know places on the trace where you could place a car and know the limits a little better than people coming back for their first or second times.”

Heading into the third event of a 13-race season, Sellers is still scrambling to gain his footing after a disqualification in the opener at Greenville-Pickens stripped him of a win and saddled him with 30th-place points. And, since he is trying to bring home a championship for his new Andy Santerre Motorsports team, the blow was a tough one for Sellers to absorb.

“You can’t take many 30th-place finishes,” Sellers said. “We have to treat every race as if it’s a playoff race, because we only got 13 to begin with.”

Last week, Sellers had what he called a good performance, but poor points race at Iowa Speedway. He ran in the top-five for most of the race, but his car never got back to where it had been before after a late pit stop and he finished a disappointing 13th.

“We didn’t have a poor performance at Iowa. But at the end of the day the performance didn’t match the numbers,” Sellers said. “We have to start putting up some numbers.”

And that is why Sellers is looking forward to tonight’s race at South Boston Speedway. After all the success he has had at the Halifax County track as a Late Model driver, it might be just the thing Sellers needs to catapult from 20th back to the upper echelons of the point standings.

Now, if only Sellers can turn in a repeat performance from the last time the East Series rolled into South Boston — a sprint to the finish in which he placed second to Matt Kobyluck by a scant .411 seconds.

“It couldn’t get much better than last year was. It was a picture perfect night short of a win,” Sellers said. “We’re going to have to hit it just right.”

That much may be made easier by the wealth of information that Sellers has this season. Not only does Sellers have his own data from last year’s East Series race at SoBo to work with, but after signing with ASM, he also has the entire team’s cache of knowledge to tap into as well.

“I just feel like we have so much more information to pull from this year,” Peyton’s brother and crew chief H.C. said. “I still think it’s going to be tough to top what we did last year, but the good thing is we can improve on it.

“We can win.”