USAR (CECIL, GA.) - JEGS.com pro St. Amant still hungers for USAR title (USAR/JEGS)

JEGS.com pro St. Amant still hungers for USAR title Panicking on the racetrack and changing your strategy mid-race rarely produces favorable results. For USAR Hooter's Pro Cup championship contender Gary St. Amant, sweating his recent and wholly untimely two-race slump wouldn't do much good either.

Therefore, although he enters this weekend's Aaron's 250 at South Georgia Motorsports Park 66 points behind three-time series champion Bobby Gill ('99-'01), two-time short track world champion St. Amant refuses to waver from a season-long race day tactic that kept him in the points lead after eight of 11 races this season.

"We aren't going to change anything," St. Amant said. "We had a car that was capable of winning both of these last two races, and certainly one that was able to finish in the top three, but we ended up 24th and 31st. It's disappointing, yes, but we can't go crazy trying to figure out why things have turned out this way. The bottom line is that we're still in this deal, very much so, and we're going to give it our all to get back to the top."

St. Amant was caught up in a late accident in Iowa on Sept. 22, and lost a belt that operates his oil pump at the recently-completed Oct. 6 race in Myrtle Beach, N.C. The piece failed through no fault of St. Amant or his JEGS.com/Speedco race team.

"It's just a part of racing," said St. Amant, who won his previous two world titles on the ASA tour. "It's a bad time to have a hiccup like this but what are you going to do? It could be a whole lot worse. We only dropped to fourth and we can still see Bobby right in front of us."

In Pro Cup racing, a driver can gain as many as 116 points on another racer in a single event, but St. Amant is looking at his task as a two-race assignment.

"There're two races left to decide the 2007 champion and we need to race them both as hard as we can," he said. "I think we're at a point where we probably need to win one and have a top-three, top-five at the other one. We've had seven top-five finishes in 11 races this year so it's not out of the question by any means, but those guys in front of us are fired-up also. It'll be a battle and this weekend will tell us a lot."

Gates open at 3 p.m. Saturday with qualifying scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Prerace begins at 6:30 p.m. and the green flag drops at 7 p.m.