"Everyone can do the same things I do," he’ll say.

But the fact is, he’s dead wrong. Not everyone can do what Maurice Young has done at Wiscasset Raceway.

Young is just two races away from locking up a track record with the seventh championship of his career, six of which will have come in the Strictly Street ranks. He’s already won 11 races this season, including arguably the biggest of his career, the $3,000-to-win Strictly Street Nationals last weekend.

Young has three 100-lap wins to his credit now, and three 75-lap Strictly wins in the last two seasons.

Clearly, not everyone can do what he does.

"Maybe it’s just a little bit more of an obsession than just a hobby," Young said.

Young may open his notes to anyone who asks, even giving them usually guarded information like tire pressures and temperatures.

"The tape’s right there out in the open with all that stuff written right down," Young said. "But that doesn’t mean everybody knows what to do with that information."

Young does, to the point that other racers have become envious, fans have become disgusted and even media types have become bored at seeing him win in such dominant fashion so regularly. His success, in large part, comes from the fact that he treats his machine like it’s a top-flight Late Model or Pro Stock and not an entry-level ride that only gets to come out Saturday night.

He works on his car every chance he gets, performing routine maintenance and repairs. The night before the Nationals, Young went out and bought a new radiator hose – "a $12 insurance policy" – knowing that it would undergo added stress during a race five times longer than it’s usually accustomed to.

"I don’t really know how that expression goes – but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or whatever it is," Young said. "If I raced coolers, I’d make sure everything was right. I love racing, and I just hate to come down here and make an ass of myself. So it’s preparation.... People give me (crap) because they say they work a 40-plus-hour a week job and they don’t have the time to devote to the car. Well, news flash, stupid. So don’t I.

"I choose to take my moments that I’m not with my family and kids – and be in the garage. I told them I was going to stop racing and go fishing, but I talked in myself right out of that in a hurry – in a hurry."

Young has done everything he can in a Strictly, proven everything there is to prove, and it’s time to move on. While he may think a race car is a race car, no matter what division it competes in, his preparation outclasses that of most of his opponents.

Where’s the sport in working around the clock to beat opponents that, in many cases, load the car on a trailer a few minutes after the feature and drive it home – only to leave it covered by a tarp all week and don’t roll it back out until the first practice the following week?

Quite honestly, there isn’t any. And Young knows it. He’s planning to run either a Sportsman or a Late Model in 2009.

"I’m to the point now where I want to play with more things, as far as the chassis, and experiment with more things," he said. "I can do all that stuff now. I’ve kind of acquired more people in my little realm of knowledge that I can pull resources from."

But don’t try telling him that a Late Model championship is better than a Strictly one.

"Not to me," Young said. "A championshp’s a championship, no matter what you’re doing. You don’t get remembered for winning races, you get remembered for winning championships."

And how he wins them in the future could be more important than having won them in the past.

Posted at 10:35 p.m. by TBarrett