DEMING — Don’t let anybody tell you it’s easy to be the defending champion.

Aaron Fell, the defending 1,200 class winner of the Nooksack River Casino Clay Cup Nationals, certainly won’t.

Fell left Deming Speedway Thursday, July 17 after the first night of the 25th running of Clay Cup with a pronounced limp from a knee he said he banged up and a bent right front shock from a mix-up on the track, but he did manage a solid fifth-place finish in the 1,200 A-Main. He finished four spots behind race winner Jason Bloodgood, from Burlington, while Lake Stevens’ Austin Wheatley won the 600 A-Main.

“I’ll tell you, it wasn’t easy,” Fell said after the race.

It hasn’t been easy for most of the week, Fell said, after he blew the 1,000cc engine he used to win last year’s Clay Cup championship. Deming Speedway track owner Paul Lemley loaned Fell a motor to put in the car, but it took a number of late nights to get it mounted in the sprint car.

“We really appreciate Paul helping us out,” Fell said. “But it sits completely different in the car, and getting the balance right has been really tough. We’ve been adjusting on it quite a bit.”

The night before he took the new motor racing, Fell and his team had the car in the shop for some last-minute adjustments.

“I have to thank Tim from PS Performance, because he spent a long night working with us,” Fell said. “I didn’t leave until 11 p.m., and I know I got him in trouble with his wife.”

Despite all that work, Fell did not get to run hot laps because of a fuel pump problem and was placed last in qualifying with no time.

But things started to look up for the defending champ in his heat race, when he missed qualifying for the A-Main by only one spot. He then earned a transfer spot to the A by winning the B-Main by 3.3 seconds over Ed Luke.

In the A-Main, Fell had moved up six spots to seventh by a caution on lap 15. By lap 22, he was in fifth and battling to move up even higher.

“We passed some cars and ran pretty good,” Fell said. “But we still have some work to do before Saturday.”

That’s if he wants to catch Bloodgood, who was pretty impressive taking the lead from Brent Holloway after the lap 15 restart and passing second- place Makenzi Thomas in the process.

“On the restart, I just got a good jump,” Bloodgood said. “I didn’t quite have enough to get them in turns 1 and 2, but stayed with them into turn 3 and took the lead coming off turn 4.”

Bloodgood, who started the A-Main sixth, said he was happy to get some passing points on his way to the 1.5- second victory over secondplace Logan Forler.

Drivers will try to improve upon the qualifying points they earned Thursday, July 17 in the second night of racing to earn a good position for the final night on Saturday, July 19, when they will be competing for their share of the $15,000 purse.

“It’s kind of a different point system they use (for Clay Cup),” Bloodgood said. “You never know exactly where you stand until the post the points, but I think with the passing points we should be in pretty good shape.”

Wheatley also figures he’s in good position after his firstnight victory, in which he jumped at the opportunity to grab the lead early and stretched it to as much as half a lap before a caution caught the field up. Jake Benson finished 1.9 seconds back in second, and Kyle Johnson was third.

“I just tried to hit my marks and not get out of the groove,” the 15-year-old Wheatley said.

Wheatley also had to battle his share of adversity Thursday, as a fuel flow problem relegated him to 16th in qualifying.

“We got that fixed and get into the A-Main, and then I passed some cars,” Wheatley said. “It’s a big boost for us.”

The scariest moment of the night came on the first lap of the 600 C-Main, when D.J. Kosa got mixed up in traffic on the first turn. Kosa’s car ended up on its top wing in the first turn and then somersaulted over the outside fence between turns 1 and 2 and disappeared from view behind the screen.

Fortunately, Kosa walked away from the spectacular wreck after his car reportedly landed on all four wheels, but his night was finished.

According to an announcement at the track, Kosa was the first driver to clear the retaining fence at Deming Speedway in more than six years.