GRAIN VALLEY – Perseverance helped Ray Countian Doug Brisbin get his third-place finish in the E-modified feature race July 3 at Valley Speedway.

Running fourth late in the 20-lap race, hoping to pass Kansas City’s Mike Ryun, Brisbin tried multiple ways to overtake Ryun. Repeatedly, his attempts got thwarted.

“He’s really fast out there,” Brisbin said. “He’s won several (races) this year. … I just kept trying to gain on him … just a little bit at a time. I’d try (running) high, sometimes try low. He was doing the same thing because he was trying to move up to the front, too.”

Near the end, Brisbin overtook Ryun.

“It was pretty tough. … There … (weren’t) a whole lot of cars out here tonight, but all the cars that were out here were the really fast ones,” he said. “So it made it tough to move up.”

In the heat race, a six-lap preliminary race that determined the starting positions for the feature, Brisbin had to fight off a challenge to secure his fifth-place finish. Repeatedly, Independence’s Jason Smith tried to pass him. Repeatedly, Brisbin held his ground.

Peripheral vision helped Brisbin keep his position, he said. Unlike, say, the drivers in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup series, Brisbin had no team of spotters to let him know how close Smith was.

“I knew he was back there because I could see him just out of the corner of my eye just a little bit every once in a while,” he said.

Intuition also might have helped Brisbin hold off Smith.

“If you race long enough, you can kind of feel them and you can feel their car to know if they’re getting close to you,” he said. “But sometimes, you don’t know at all. And if there’s a good driver behind you, he knows that. So he’s not going to try to stick it in there where he knows you’re going to go and then you end up wrecking.”

In both races, Brisbin finished higher than his starting position. In the heat race, he started in sixth and moved up one spot. In the feature, he started in fifth and moved up two spots.

Moving up in the heat race was difficult not only because of a fast fleet, but also because of the track conditions, Brisbin said.

“They watered the track just before our heat race, which makes it feel like ice out there,” he said.

Because of the slick surface, Brisbin and the other drivers were simply trying to avoid wrecking, he said.

“We figured it’d get lined out in the feature and we’d try to move up from there,” Brisbin said.

Brisbin was one of two area residents who raced that night at Valley Speedway. Lawson’s Garret Stonum placed third in his heat and in the feature race in the IMCA stars mod lite class.