With a third-place finish in Saturday’s ARCA Menards Series East event at the historic Flat Rock Speedway, Takuma Koga became one of the division’s best feel-good underdog stories in quite some time.
Piloting the red, white, and blue No. 12 Toyota Camry for Andy Hillenburg’s Fast Track Racing, Koga was able to bring home a new career-best result – not only in the East Series, but across the ARCA Menards Series platform — at the quarter-mile racetrack located in Flat Rock, Michigan.
The result matches the best finish of the season for an entry listed under the Fast Track Racing ownership, matching the finish by Eloy Falcon at Rockingham earlier this season, in a REV Racing-prepared entry using the points of the No. 10.
It’s been since September 2021, when Ken Schrader earned a third-place finish at DuQuoin State Fairgrounds, that Fast Track Racing has placed an entry that the organization prepared inside the top three in any race across the ARCA Menards Series platform.
Koga didn’t just end up inheriting a third-place result on the afternoon either, the 48-year-old driver earned that spectacular result, spending the majority of the 150-lap contest running there, after getting past series points leader Isaac Kitzmiller.
There were even several points throughout the first half of Saturday’s event that Koga was giving the top-two drivers of Max Reaves (Joe Gibbs Racing) and Tyler Reif (Sigma Performance Services) a challenge for the race lead.
The native of Nagoya, Japan, is a unique individual in the world of the ARCA Menards Series, traveling back and forth to his home country in between races. Koga has been competing in a division of the ARCA Menards Series (formerly the NASCAR K&N Pro Series) since 2002, mostly in the ARCA Menards Series West, and prior to Saturday, had only amassed four top-five finishes.
Three of those four top-five results in the ARCA Menards Series West came at Portland International Raceway, a tricky road course located in Portland, Oregon. His only top-five result on an oval was a fifth-place finish in the 2017 Sunrise Ford 150 at Orange Show Speedway, a quarter-mile racetrack just like Flat Rock Speedway.
After climbing from his No. 12 Toyota Camry on the frontstretch of Flat Rock Speedway, Koga kept his answer pretty clear and concise, saying: “I love short tracks.”
The third-place result at Flat Rock Speedway marks the second top-10 result for Koga in the ARCA Menards Series East this season, besting his previous best result of seventh-place, which came the last time out at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.
At the halfway point of his first full-time campaign in the ARCA Menards Series East, Koga currently sits inside the top-five in series point standings, and fourth place among the drivers running the entire eight-race campaign in 2025.
Rock Speedway, as each of the remaining four events on the ARCA Menards Series East schedule – Dover, Iowa, IRP, and Bristol – are combination events with the ARCA Menards Series, and will feature significantly larger fields.
Koga’s next event in the ARCA Menards Series at the moment is scheduled to be Dover Motor Speedway, a tricky one-mile racetrack that the ARCA Menards Series West veteran has never seen in his career.
