Rookie Parker Kligerman’s wild ride: 6th-place finish at Pocono ARCA 200 to the senior prom

Kligerman’s wild ride: Pocono to the senior prom

LONG POND, Pa. — Parker Kligerman took off his helmet after hopping out of the car, revealing a scruffy mop of brown hair.

First priority for the 18-year-old ARCA driver after Saturday’s run at Pocono Raceway: getting cleaned up for the prom.

A whirlwind day that began with the rookie’s first spin around the triangle track was supposed to end about 140 miles away at a Greenwich, Conn., hotel for his Staples High School senior prom on Saturday night.

The teen planned to trade in his firesuit and Dodge for a tuxedo and private jet. His girlfriend would probably monitor the race online, though she wasn’t pressuring him to finish up early at work.

“No, no, if she did, I wouldn’t probably go with her,” Kligerman said after Saturday’s practice. “I don’t need bad omens like that.”

For a while Saturday, it looked like Kligerman would show up at the prom a Pocono winner. He traded leads with eventual winner Joey Logano for much of the afternoon until a flat left front tire forced him to pit at midrace while he was just ahead of Logano.

Kligerman finished sixth in the 80-lap race around the 2.5-mile tri-oval.

Logano got a nice primer for Sunday, when he planned to drive in the Sprint Cup series’ Pocono 500. The 19-year-old rookie’s biggest challenge came from Kligerman, and even that didn’t worry him too much.

“We had one little battle there,” Logano said. “I just didn’t want to abuse my car at that point in the race. … I wasn’t going to beat the doors out of it at that time.

Saturday also served as another milestone in the remarkable career of 74-year-old James Hylton, the ARCA graybeard from Inman, S.C., who made his 700th career start. He’s had 601 starts in the NASCAR Sprint Cup series.

But no driver Saturday had a schedule quite like Kligerman’s.

The developmental driver for Penske Racing via Cunningham Motorsports notched his first career win two weeks ago at Toledo, in only his eighth career start. Kligerman was second behind ARCA points leader Justin Lofton heading into Pocono, and just ahead of nine-time ARCA champion Frank Kimmel.

Kimmel, whom Kligerman considers one of his mentors, was 29 when the rookie was born in 1990.

Kligerman started getting into racing as an 8-year-old watching the Speed Channel, even though “no one in my family had ever been around racing or heard of racing,” he said. “It just took years and years of begging, telling my parents, ‘I can do this, if you just help me out.’”

Things are working out so far — even on prom night.

Kligerman said he didn’t realize that Pocono and his prom were on the same day until a meeting several weeks ago. Last week, Penske Racing surprised him with use of a private plane for this weekend to fly back to his home in Westport, Conn.

After circling the track for 90-plus minutes, he was ready to dance around a hotel ballroom on Saturday night.

“Racing is a career. … You can’t give something like that up for prom,” he said. “Of course, if it can happen, you can make it happen.”

Quite a different world from the one Hylton grew up in. He learned to drive as a teen by operating a tractor, and started racing as an amateur at age 15. He turned pro three years later.

“It’s the only job I’ve had since I was 18,” he said. “I still got the fire.”

Hylton said he gets butterflies in his stomach when he’s behind the wheel — but only out of excitement instead of fear, like in his rookie days. He finished 24th Saturday at Pocono.

Old enough to be Kligerman’s grandfather, Hylton said he enjoys mentoring competitors who often are at least three times younger than him. He plans to continue to keep a full schedule — at least through next February when he tries to qualify again for the Daytona 500 — and probably longer.

He keeps getting clean bills of health from his yearly physicals for NASCAR and ARCA.

“I schedule it from race to race, as long as my health holds out. I’m very fortunate,” he said.

Hylton also doesn’t begrudge the opportunities available these days to younger racers like Kligerman, who may enjoy a much larger crew of mechanics and support staff in their developmental years than Hylton did growing up.

“When I was his age, I was racing around old dirt tracks and stuff, and didn’t have time to go to no prom,” Hylton said. “Too busy trying to make a living.”