Just one week removed from securing his career-first NMCA race title, Rob Goss made the long trip from his home in Wyoming pay off again Sep. 30, with his first Duck X Productions victory at No Mercy 9 in Valdosta, GA.  

Goss won pretty much every way possible at No Mercy 9--come from behind, holeshot, stripe-to-stripe--but the one that really counted came in the X275 final when he overcame an early lead by number-one qualifier Shane Fisher.

"We didn’t do what we hoped; the car stumbled a little bit out of the 60 foot," Goss admitted after his 4.52 at 163.59 mph beat a 4.81 at 159.61 by Fisher. "But my competitor had a little mishap and we took advantage of it and got the win.

"We haven't pulled the data yet, but I think it went lean a little. When it does that, it takes away the power and then we didn’t 60 foot like we should have. Then it went downhill from there," he continued. "But maybe that was a blessing because I don't think the track would've have held much more."

After 39 entries made qualifying runs, Fisher's '93 Mustang led the 32-car raceday field with a 4.39 at 172.98 mph, both the quickest and fastest X275 pass of the event. Kenny Hubbard's '90 Mustang started second with a 4.40 at 160.19 mph, followed by Goss just four-thousandths back in third at 4.40 and 165.42 mph.

Fisher, from Dewitt, AR, opened with a solo pass when Stevie Benoit couldn't make the call, then ran a string of low- to mid-4.40s in beating Tony Alm, Mark Moore and Ron Rhodes to reach the X275 final. 

Meanwhile, Goss overcame a huge .081 holeshot by Tom Marshall to win with a 4.55 in round one; left with his own big .088 advantage and easily outran John Capolla with a 4.40 in round two; beat a 4.43 by John Keesey thanks to a .029 holeshot that allowed Goss' 4.46 to post a 4-thousandths margin of victory; and caught a break in the semis when Hubbard stumbled and a 4.97 set up Goss for his pairing with Fisher.

Immediately after the NMCA race in Indianapolis, Goss and crew headed straight to BES Racing Engines in Guilford, IN, where engine builder Tony Bischoff helped swap in a slightly larger 430 c.i. Gen III Hemi outfitted with a F-1X Procharger into Goss' 2009 Challenger.

"We had made the semi-finals at Duck's races two other times. Had an engine failure in one, and spun in another and lost. We had some things going for us back then, but the X275 class just got so fast and the car wasn’t capable of keeping up. The chassis was not right. We were always running overweight and the engine package was giving us some troubles, although it always showed a lot of potential."

No Mercy 9 represented the first time Goss had run in X275 trim since Long's similar Lights Out event in spring 2017. He arrived at South Georgia Motorsports Park late Tuesday afternoon, made one test hit on Wednesday and went straight into qualifying on Thursday. 

"Tony built us a great motor, but our success here is all due to Wade Hopkins and Southern Speed. We had everything we needed to win but couldn’t get it figured out, the crew and I together. So we brought in Wade, I guess it’s been two or three months ago now, and he's been the difference," Goss insisted.

"We’ve raced this class now with Duck for about five years. We built this car in 2013 and this was our first event, I think it was October back then and we've just been working on it since. So it took a long time to figure out how to make it work, but it's great to see it finally paying off."