"Maybe the banquet will mean more, have more of a meaning to it."

At that banquet next month, Turner, 27, of Unity, will collect a check from Wiscasset owner Doug White in the total of $10,000. A real $10,000 bill.

Turner led the track’s Super Late Model division with nine top-five finishes in 14 starts this season, and he unofficially claimed the track championship over Fairfield’s Jeff Burgess by just 18 points. The margin between the two championship hopefuls was just 10 points entering the 50-lap feature on Sunday evening, and Burgess had successfully whittled it to as few as two points "as they ran" with 10 laps remaining.

At that point, Turner was fighting to hold off a charging Chuck Colby for fifth place while Burgess was leading the field – trying to add to his three wins in his previous four starts, a hot streak that propelled him into the championship picture very late in the season.

But Burgess encountered trouble on lap 40, suddenly spinning out all by himself as his car exited the track’s fourth turn, leaving him outside the top-10 and, most importantly, out of the championship.

Charlie Colby of Edgecomb went on to win the race for his first feature win of the season. Gary Smith finished second, and Ryan Deane was third.

"I hate to say it, but it was kind of a sigh of relief," Turner said of seeing Burgess spin. "I’ve only won one championship before (at Unity Raceway in 2004), but I didn’t have nearly this much pressure on me. This year, there was just so much competition, and Jeff was so fast that he put so much pressure on me the last few weeks."

Burgess said that, while he was working as hard as he could to keep is car pinned to the bottom, he had no inkling that the rear end would suddenly break free as Smith hounded him for the race lead.

"I guess I just got loose," said Burgess, who slipped to ninth in the final rundown. "Trying too hard, I guess... I was protecting the bottom and she came around in a hurry. She didn’t do that all day."

But even had Burgess won, he still needed Turner to finish outside the top-5, something he hadn’t done in several weeks.

"If we could have won, maybe it would have been a little bit different story," Burgess said. "We did everything we thought we needed to do, but it just wasn’t enough. It’s not too disappointing. We really only had a good month and a half, so in a six-month season to only have a (good) month and a half and still end up second in the standings, that’s still pretty good."

Burgess and Turner both credited Turner’s championship run – which came without benefit of a single trip to victory lane – to consistency from start to finish.

"The first part of the year, I didn’t care about points," Turner said. "I tried not thinking about the championship until the last month, the last four weeks – everybody else was paying attention to the points, though. I told them they could do whatever they wanted with that, but I didn’t want them to tell me about points.

"I wanted to win a race. That was our goal for the year, and we still didn’t do that. I wanted to win races. Points are good, they pay more. But if we’d have had 10 wins, we’d have won just as much, right?"

Posted at 11:25 p.m. by TBarrett