Right from the start of the season, everybody knew Nic Montanari was someone to watch as he came out and won the opening night feature.

“Up until that point, I had truly never thought of any points battle and didn’t even consider a championship run as a option,” Montanari told Short Track Musings.

From there on, poise and consistency was the name of the game with no finishes outside of the top-nine en route to being crowned the 2016 Sunset Speedway Mini Stock Champion.

“Overall, I’m happy with the year,” Montanari told Short Track Musings. “The car only got wrecked once, majority of my finishes were top 3; I can’t complain to much. There were times where I could have pushed a little harder, but we set our sites on the points battle so I did what I had to to make the championship happen.”

Over the course of the 14 race season, the driver of the No. 98 HIGHWAY TECHNOLOGY, SELECT DELIVERY, DR.JAY PERTOFF AT MAPLE RIDGE DENTAL AND PERMATEX Mini Stock posted 10 top-five finishes to go along with six heat wins and two feature victories. The success marks no surprise for many, as the Montanaris have been involved in racing for awhile, with Nic’s father Rino Montanari serving as crew chief this past season for Mark Dilley and Kerry Micks in the NASCAR Pinty’s Series.

“He’s the most valuable asset to my race program,” Montanari said of his father. “It’s awesome having him there, whether it’s for him and I to bounce ideas off each other, or even just to come up with new ideas. Learning to setup a front-wheel drive car is defiantly a change for him, seeing as next to no rear-wheel drive knowledge is transferable, but I think it just shows his ability to improvise and work with what he’s got.”

The success was also a continuation of what he started in 2015, after winning two of the first three races in the Mighty Mini division. After moving up to Mini Stock that year, he posted five top-10s with a best finish of ninth.

“I got a few wins, but I was also moved up a division mid-season, so there was also the transitional period to get used to,” he said.

With the success experienced, Montanari will return to the Mini Stock division once again in 2017, with hopes of possibly scoring back-to-back championships.

“I’m going to be stick to Mini Stocks and see where it goes from there,” he said. “We’re going to keep up the effort, and try and hang onto the momentum coming into next season.”

While there will be a lot of other familiar faces joining Montanari, the landscape of the division is set to change. Sunset recently announced they’re doing away with the pair of Mini Stock divisions, switching to a single division approach in 2017.

“It will defiantly be interesting,” Montanari said. “There’s pros and cons to the decision, but it’s impossible to please everyone. The added car count will beneficial to the NASCAR points system. One issue may be the lap time difference, as there would be cars over 2.5 seconds off the leaders pace. It will finally be a chance to race against my brother, so that’ll be interesting.

“I think he could have had a good shot at his own championship last year; if it wasn’t for mechanical failure and getting wrecked, he would have been much higher in points.”