Kankakee, Ill. ~ It took a winless 2004 for Terry Rinker to get motivated. The 2003 ChampBoat Series Champion didn’t like losing, so he rebuilt his boat and his body and stormed out front for his second ChampBoat Series championship in Kankakee, Ill. over the Labor Day weekend.
Rinker won three of the first four races in 2005, and had to fight through adversity to stay on top after the final race of the season. Thousands of fans lined the shorelines of the Kankakee River for the 21st Annual American Power Boat Association’s OPC Nationals. The championship weekend would feature a narrow two-pin, one-mile course.
Rinker would not breeze through the weekend as he hoped. After qualifying sixth on Sunday, Rinker would take to the water on Monday morning for the warm-up session. But a self-proclaimed “driver error” put the yellow #10 on its back. The crash caused a massive rush to fix the damaged boat in time for the final event. If the boat didn’t get fixed in time, Rinker would have had to take out his back-up boat and start dead last. But the team was able to dry out and fix the boat in time for the start.
When the final event began, Rinker was sitting in his sixth qualifying spot and optimism was running high. The AMSOIL-backed driver raced hard during the 50-lap feature and when the checkered flag dropped, Rinker had finished fifth. That was enough to secure his second career title. Three wins and five podiums aided Rinker in the eight-race season.
“It is such a great feeling to be back on top,” said Rinker after the race. “We had one goal this year, and that was to win something. We didn’t care what it was, just as long as we won something. Well we won something alright, and we did it by rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty.”
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