"We won the series last year, but our main focus was to win races this year," Lee said. "That seems to be what we're doing, and we're leading in points."
Lee, nicknamed the "Lincoln Lead Foot," dominated Friday's Pete Abell Memorial at Ponderosa, turning the fastest lap in time trials and leading the 40-lap feature race from wire to wire.
"We've had the best car all year. Everywhere we've went with it, we've been good," he said.
The next night, Lee finished fifth in a race at Bardstown, but he still added slightly to his series points lead.
His lead is 525 points with eight races remaining. The next event is Saturday in Richmond, and the series, which runs primarily in Kentucky but also at nearby tracks in Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee, races once more at Ponderosa on Aug. 1 and concludes Sept. 20 at Bardstown.
This is only the second year in the Battle of the Bluegrass series for the 28-year-old Lee, who said his love of the sport comes from watching his father, Sammy, race.
"I just grew up helping my dad until I got old enough where I could race and started racing go-carts," he said.
He graduated from go-carts to open-wheel modifieds to late models. "I tried running both of them (modifieds and late models) for a couple of seasons, but that just didn't work," he said.
Lee had been in late models for only a couple of years when he and car owner Frank Revel started talking about forming a partnership.
"He wanted to run the series, and of course I did, too," Lee said.
Revel and wife Debbie have been involved in racing since 1996 and share ownership of Lee's car. Debbie Revel said Lee and her husband "work good together."
Credit for the crew
Lee said his success is also due to the hard work of his five-person crew.
"I've got five of the best help there is," he said. "We work on it through the week and have a lot of fun and really enjoy what we're doing. We're all just good buddies."
The team consists of four men and one woman, Lee's girlfriend Sarah Billings.
"She keeps the times down and tells me where I need to line up at. She's good at clocking, and she's got a big part in this," Lee said.
Everyone on the crew has specific responsibilities, including Lee, who handles the body work, sheet metal and lettering on the car. The lettering falls right into an area of expertise for Lee, who operates Extreme Style Signs and Graphics adjacent to his racing shop just south of Stanford.
Lee's two series wins at Ponderosa, where he is currently third in the track's super late model standings, came in races named for two of the track's best-known drivers, the Hugh "Junebug" Rowland Memorial on May 30 and the Abell memorial on Friday.
"Both these races honestly mean a lot to me. When I was a kid I knew both of those guys and watched them," Lee said
"To win a race in honor of their name, let alone the series and the money, that means a lot to me because they're two good racers and they loved the sport. A lot of people don't look at that, but I do."
Lee said he's happy to have the prize money, including the $3,000 first-place check he claimed Friday, but he said he isn't profiting from his success.
"Everything we win, it goes right back into the car," he said. "We've been fortunate enough this year to win enough to buy the truck and trailer."
As in most racing series, it's possible to stay on top of the points standings without winning races, just as Lee did last year. But he wanted to take a different approach this season.
"Last year we went after the points, and points racing's a lot different because you've got to finish every week. So this year we decided no matter what the points are, we wanted to win races," he said. "If you win a bunch of these races, you can win the points."
And he said he prefers doing it this way.
"This is a lot more satisfying year, to come back and run as well as we are," he said.
* * *
On the Web: www.victorlee4.com
