Solid Season Results in Second Place in Final Standings for Michael Self

The old adage is second place is the first loser. Or no one remembers who finished second.

Michael Self did everything he could to dispel those sayings on his way to second in the final ARCA Menards Series standings in 2019.

Self, from Salt Lake City, Utah, led the series championship standings from the sixth race of the year at Toledo Speedway before losing it to eventual champion Christian Eckes in the penultimate race of the season at Lucas Oil Raceway outside of Indianapolis.

Unfortunately for Self, the five races he finished outside of the top ten were costly. As were a pair of post-race technical violations that cost him 75 points. He ended up 25 points shy of Eckes following Friday night’s finale at Kansas Speedway.

As it was over the course of the season, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Self did everything he could to try to close the gap on Eckes. He missed out on five bonus points in qualifying by just seven one-hundredths of a second to General Tire Pole Award winner Tanner Gray. At the drop of the green he jumped into the lead and dominated the first half of the race, scoring first five bonus points for leading a lap and then eventually the final five bonus points of the day for leading the most laps.

At lap 51, Self was leading and had ten bonus points in the bag. Had the race ended then, Self would have won and earned 245 points. Eckes, who entered with a 15-point lead over Self, would have finished second and earned 220 points. The calculator says that had the race ended at lap 51, Self would have won the championship by ten points over Eckes.

Unfortunately for Self and his Shannon Rursch-led team, the race ran to its full 100-lap distance.

Eckes would take the lead at lap 58 and lead the rest of the way, building up a three-second lead at times. Self was able to somewhat narrow that gap over the last ten laps but the sands finally ran out of the hour glass and Eckes crossed the stripe 1.9 seconds ahead.

Whenever a driver comes out on the short end of a particularly close championship fight, the “what ifs” begin. When Bill Elliott lost to Alan Kulwicki in the 1992 NASCAR Cup Series championship battle, it was easy to pinpoint where he could have made up the difference. Had he led one more lap in the finale at Atlanta, causing Kulwicki to not lead that lap, Kulwicki wouldn’t have earned the bonus points for leading the most laps. That ten-point point swing would have caused a tie, and the tie breakers would have gone to Elliott.

For Self, the races at Daytona, Nashville, and WWT Raceway come to mind. Self was taken out in a lap two crash at Daytona, was involved in another crash with a lapped car at Nashville and had an axle break at WWT Raceway.

Despite the bad luck that plagued him at times over the course of the season, Self and team had a solid season. Self won four times, Five Flags Speedway, Salem Speedway, Michigan International Speedway, and the Springfield Mile at the Illinois State Fairgrounds. He scored 14 top-five and 15 top-10 finishes and led 537 laps throughout the course of the season. He also won five General Tire Pole Awards, more than any other driver.

Not bad for a driver that hadn’t competed in a full season in anything since 2013.

Self will be honored for his second-place finish in the ARCA Menards Series standings champion on Saturday, December 14 at the Championship Banquet held at the Indiana State Convention Center, held annually in conjunction with the Performance Racing Industry Trade Show. Tickets to the black tie gala, which are also available to the general public, will go on sale Monday, October 28.