Ooooh, look at the fast car Mommy!

Well, I gotta tell ya, it was one heck of a breakthrough weekend for good Ole’ Team LaCross.

Sometimes in racing it’s all about numbers… Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad, sometimes you just toss your hands in the air and wonder why

18.096 – 12 – 1 – 13 – 17.822 – 8 – 9 – 1/8 – 3

18.096 – Our Qualifying time this week. 2/10ths faster than we have gone before. At this rate, we should be hitting the 4’s sometime soon… Heh

12 – Our qualifying position. I’ve got to figure out a way to get a qualifying set up in the car that Crash can drive into the 17’s. This, by the way just happened to be the invert for this week’s race, which leads us to…

1 – Our starting position for the main. The first pole position start for us in a Late Model. It is also the first pole start for us in I don’t know how many years, because in the Mini’s we ALWAYS started in the back due to either our points position or from a top three the week before (in the Mini stock class, there is a full field invert every week, which is dictated by championship points position)

13 – Laps led. For the first 8 laps, Crash drove away from the field. It was awesome to see him driving that car out front, leading 2^nd by upwards of 12 car lengths. It reminded me of the old days when we would slice through the field in the Scirocco then run away from the field and tool around the track like it was a Sunday test session.

17.822 – Scott’s fastest race lap. Also Scott’s fastest time lap to date! This is where we need to be to stay competitive. It really made me happy to pop onto MyLaps.com yesterday and see that number. We now have confirmation that the car is definitely capable of running those numbers and faster and we know the driver can click those numbers off too!

8 – Practice laps total for the day. Unfortunately, we wanted to scuff in our qualifying tires and did not have a swift enough tire change back to the practice hoops to get in any quality laps to really tune the car. However, what we were able to learn in the heat race was what gave us reason to make a couple of small changes that really paid off for the main event. This was also our finishing position in the race. The track was unusually dirty Sat night and that led to a slight off track excursion while running in 2^nd around the 15^th lap or so. We dropped from 2^nd to 16^th as Scott did a great job driving down the dirt off of the back stretch and avoided crashing or spinning the car, staying on the lead lap! I was pretty happy that he was able to race his way back into the top 10, all the while constantly having to restart after the many yellows on the outside, in the aforementioned mess of a groove.

9 – The track has not updated the points as of this writing, but if my estimates are correct, this should be our current position in the championship point standings.

1/8 – The amount in inches of dirt that was in the 2^nd and 3^rd groove of the track. Memorial Day weekend was the monster truck extravaganza and I don’t think they did a very good job of getting the track cleaned up. That and the addition of a “drifting” exhibition which of course left copious amounts of rubber all over the place. The real stinker is that Scott said he felt the car would have been pretty good up in the 2^nd groove had the track condition not been more suited to 420 sprinters at Skagit instead of Asphalt late models.

3 – As in Turn 3… the turn that Scott was returning to the track in after another short grass mowing session (3 wide just doesn’t work out there… lol) When a car spun directly in front of him, causing us to have to Frankenstein the left front fender back together for this week’s race. I gotta tell ya, the hot rod came out of that pretty good all things considered. The hood is fine, bumper is good and the fender will pass for now with some tin, rivets and stickers. Just don’t look too close at the autograph session this week!

Over all, even though we didn’t get that first top 5 this week, we were all pretty thrilled about the day’s progress. We had a top 5 car easily, now we need to build on it and see this through to a successful season with the goals of a top 5 race finish and top 10 points finish as the carrot on the end of the stick. I’ve determined that the Hot Rod is not just a good old car… it’s a GREAT old car with a lot of fast times ahead of it… As for the driver, well watching him race this weekend tells me that the rust is now completely shaken off and he is ready to go out there and show them all that we aren’t there to pedal around… we are there to try to win!

P.S. I want to put a special shout out to our large and voiciferous cheering section. With most of Scott's family in the crowd, we all expected a good amount of cheering, but the noise wasnt just coming from the LaCross seating area! Harrison said he could hear you all cheering all the way down in our pits in the middle of turns 3 & 4 on the 5/8ths. Thanks again for being our fans and being LOUD! You dont know how great it makes us all feel to know that you are rooting us on!