Santerre driver Caisse aiming for ride with NASCAR trucks

Sean Caisse may not win the Busch East series points championship but he is certainly making things interesting for the leaders.

Caisse, who drives for Cherryfield’s Andy Santerre and the Santerre Motorsports Team, has two wins, a second and a third in his last four races to climb from 12th to third in the points standings.

He won the inaugural Mansfield (Ohio) 150 this past weekend, capturing his series-leading fifth pole and going on to lead 136 of the 150 laps.

With two races remaining, he is 156 points behind leader Joey Logano and 74 behind second-place Matt Kobyluck. Caisse has three wins, one behind Logano’s series-high four, and six top-five finishes, second only to Logano’s eight. Caisse didn’t finish one race.

The 21-year-old from Pelham, N.H., who finished second in the points a year ago after being the series’ Rookie of the Year in 2005, isn’t the only member of the Santerre Motorsports Team who is coming on strong.

Rookie Jeffrey Earnhardt, grandson of the late Nextel Cup great Dale Earnhardt, has a fourth and two fifths in his last four races to move up to sixth in the points standings.

Caisse said their fortune has turned around after a variety of malfunctions and mistakes cost them earlier.

“I’d rather be lucky than good any day,” said Caisse. “We’ve had good cars all year but we just weren’t there at the end of races early in the season.

“It was tough. Jeffrey and I were both struggling and we’d go back to the same shop and try to figure out how to make things better. But we’ve turned things around and we’ve been carrying the momentum [we’ve created lately]. It’s real exciting. I wish the season had another 10 races to go,” he added.

Caisse said he is “real proud of his team.

“They really stuck behind me [when things weren’t going well]. They never gave up. They supported me on and off the track,” he said.

Caisse also said his 18-year-old teammate, Earnhardt, has “matured quite a bit. I’m really impressed with how he’s turned things around. He didn’t have a lot of experience and he had to deal with the pressure that goes with his name and he has handled it very well.”

Caisse knows his chances of winning the points title are slim but he said “we’re never going to give up. Joey could have some bad luck.

“We want to make sure we have good finishes in the last couple of races. I’d love to win at Loudon [Sept. 14] and I’d really love to win at Dover [Sept. 21]. We’ve got the team and the cars to do it. And we already have momentum,” said Caisse.

He is hoping to land a NASCAR Craftsman Truck ride later this season. That would help him make the transition to a full-time Busch ride next year if he can land one, Caisse explained.

“I’m talking to one [truck] team now,” said Caisse. “I’d like to run three races to get approval to run Daytona in a Busch car [next season].”

Drivers must run a super speedway in order to get approval to run one when they move up from Trucks to Busch.

White has mixed emotions

Corinna’s Paul White had mixed emotions about his sixth-place finish in the Pro All-Stars Series 150-lap race at Hermon’s Speedway 95 Sunday.

He started last (21st).

White would have started fifth in the PASS feature based on the heat-race results but he failed to pass technical inspection following the heat race.

“Other than not passing through tech, we had a pretty good day… coming from the rear with these guys. And we came home in one piece. It could have been a lot better if we had started where we qualified. But it was a bad mistake on our part and we’ll deal with it.”

White, who is second in points in the Pro Stock class at Speedway 95, said he didn’t pass tech because he had too much weight on the left side of his car. He and his team corrected the problem before the feature.