SONOMA — If Brad Lloyd keeps this up, they’ll start calling him “Timex.”

The 2009 Vintage High graduate built on his reputation as the guy who takes a licking and keeps on ticking while finishing 30th in his first professional auto race on Saturday at Infineon Raceway.

Lloyd, who played seven football games for the Crushers last fall despite breaking his arm in the season-opener, crashed on lap 23 of the 64-lap Bennett Lane Winery 200, presented by Supercuts. but managed 28 more laps. Like his senior football season, which he came up three games short of completing, he came up 13 laps short of finishing the Camping World Series West race.

But his father, Dave Lloyd, said he couldn‘t have been prouder of his son.

“It‘s hard not to compare this to football,” said Dave Lloyd. “The fact he got back out there and he kept digging in and running faster times, that’s what says it all, I think.“

Lloyd, whose friends talked before the race about his patience and how he would probably take advantage of other drivers’ spills, was ironically the first driver to crash in the race. According to his father, the front half of a fiberglass strip on the passenger side was knocked off his 2007 Ford Fusion by contact with another car, flopped around and made a cut in his rear tire. The tire blew out, causing the car to careen into a wall of tires on the back stretch.

The wheel well was caved in and Lloyd thought his day was over, so he got out of the car. As he walked to the medical center and was checked out to be OK, his car was towed to the Lloyd Family Racing trailer in a rear lot. Crew members saw that the damage was relatively minor and immediately started sledge hammering the metal away from the tire and taping up a crack above it.

“My grandpa came and got me and said ‘Hurry up, get back to the trailer, we’re going to get you back out,’” Lloyd recalled.

About 20 minutes later, he was back on the track, having missed 14 laps. Dave Lloyd said they would have lost only seven or eight laps had his son stayed in the car, allowing it to be towed to the pit instead of to the trailer, several hundred yards away.

“If the tow truck would have dropped it on the pit road, we could’ve hammered it out there and gotten it back out sooner, but all our tires and everything were (in the pit) so we had to roll them here,” Dave Lloyd said. “It was inexperience on our part.“

Lloyd also got hit in the passenger-side door late in the race, leaving a crack in it and making it look more like it had been through a demolition derby than a race.

“It looks like a tank ran over it, but it‘s just cosmetic,” Dave Lloyd said amid family and friends and autograph seekers after the race. “He ran faster with it like this than he did qualifying. At one time we were in seventh place because of pit stops. We did great, and we finished in the money. I think he got $1,750, but it’s all going to go into body work. I think we‘re going to have an auction for these body parts.”

His ability to come back and finish 51 laps may have been the reason the Lloyds received a visit from a Ford representative after the race.

“He talked to us about running Ford motors and gave us his card, so maybe we can come back next time with a little bit stronger motor next time,” Dave Lloyd said.

Dave Lloyd said it will depend on sponsorships whether they can compete in the next Camping World Series West race, in Portland, Ore., on July 19.

“We have a lot of family up there, so it would be nice,” he said.

Brad will be ready if the trip materializes.

“The thing with this track is there’s a lot of cautions — people just aren’t patient about finding a good time to pass, so they take each other out,” he said. “After my crash, there was really nothing to lose. I wanted to take it easy and make sure nothing was going to do that again, but after a while everything got back to normal for the most part. Our spotter (Jeremy Brickhouse) was talking to me the whole time. He’s Mark Martin’s spotter and he‘s good. He got me out of a couple of crashes, some pretty close calls.

“They say this is one of the harder tracks, so if I can do this one I can do a lot of other ones. Being through it, I know I can do it now and I’ll be more ready for next time and know what to expect.”

Three of his high school friends, Mitch Danielson, Trevor Wright and Justin Seward, were on hand to help their friend and also gain experience for possible pit-crewing positions some day.

“We’re hopping on the bandwagon, and at the same time we’re putting the wheels on his car,“ Danielson said.

Wright said the quiet, ever-smiling Lloyd didn’t show many nerves all weekend.

“He was a little antsy, though, and he kept going to the bathroom like crazy,” Wright said.

Lloyd said he had been drinking a lot of water because it had been very hot.

When the race started, after two warmup laps, he locked in.

“The cars ahead of me all took off really quick,” he said. “After a couple of laps I got into it and I got going with the flow and got up to speed.

“It’s been exciting leading up to the race, but it was almost to the point where I wished I could just race because everybody was always talking about it and there was all this hype. Now that that’s finally over, I can just drive.”

Joey Logano, the 19-year-old phenom who who won his third Nationwide Series race three weeks ago, led this race down the stretch before getting bumped by Patrick Long and spinning out on the final turn. Long crossed the finish line first but was penalized for aggressive driving and given a 23rd-place finish. Jason Bowles won and Logano, whom befriended Lloyd leading up to the race, ended 17th.