A week after scoring his maiden Pro 2 victory, Cory Winner will try his hand at the Stadium Super Trucks. On Tuesday, he visited SST headquarters in North Carolina to test a truck ahead of his début at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course on 1–3 July. He will drive the Continental Tire truck.
Winner currently competes in Championship Off-Road‘s Pro 2 class, which he joined in 2019 after enjoying success in Pro Lite. Three years of coming up short of reaching the top step of the podium were finally rewarded at last Saturday’s Crandon International Raceway weekend when he passed SST alumnus Keegan Kincaid for the lead and held off Jerett Brooks and Ryan Beat—both of whom have piloted the Continental stadium truck—for his first career win in the category. He followed up the triumph by finishing third in the Sunday race and thirteenth in the Forest County Potawatomi Brush Run.
A second-generation racer, Winner began in Junior Karts n 2007, but took a five-year hiatus before returning in Mod Karts. A solid performance there prompted a promotion to pro short course trucks in 2015. He won the 2017 Lucas Oil Southern California Regional Pro Lite championship, a year after finishing second in the standings. His experience also includes the larger Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series and Championship Off-Road’s spiritual predecessor TORC: The Off-Road Championship.
Despite not winning a race in 2021, he finished second in the COR Pro 2 championship battle to Kincaid by just a single point.
Winner is one of two confirmed SST newcomers at Mid-Ohio alongside Ben Maier. Coincidentally, both use #67 as their main racing numbers.
Brooks drove the Continental Tire truck in the 2022 season opener at Long Beach and the 2021 Mid-Ohio IndyCar weekend. He was fifth and tenth in the former’s two races, but scored a runner-up finish at Mid-Ohio. The 2021 round was preceded by a first trip to the Lexington road course in support of the NASCAR Xfinity Series, where Sheldon Creed won a race with Continental sponsorship. Beat’s lone SST weekend at Circuit of the Americas in 2019 marked Continental’s series début which he rewarded with a podium in Race #1. Sunday Pro Lite winner Christopher Polvoorde also has an SST podium to his name as a Continental driver at 2019 Road America.
The full entry list will be released soon.