Fair night, Fast night!

Fair nights are always great for car count. 21 cars showed up to run and we had the largest field for the evening by a long shot. Winning on Fair night is always a goal of ours, but Saturday was even better as we not only set the fast time for the day, we had recently joined the Outlaw Compact Auto Racing series and were able to set their new Evergreen 3/8s track record!

Car eats man, news at 11

We arrived at the track about 11:30 unloaded the car and got it ready for practice. We headed out on to the track and new right away that we had a pretty fast car. Track conditions were a little slick, but we still felt we needed to make a few adjustments and as you can see from the photo above, it involved a little fussing about underneath. 2nd session was better than the first and again, just a few minor changes were required before we qualified.

Qualifying consisted of 4 sessions. We were in the last group so we had plenty of opportunity to see what we would have to run to grab the pole. The pole speed started in the 19.0 second range then dropped in each progressive session to 18.5 as we headed out. Scott immediately looked good, running under 19 seconds on his very first lap and on the 3rd lap, he turned an 18.723, which got us the pole and set the Outlaw track record. We used the remainder of the laps to give the car a good hard run and see if we wanted to make any more adjustments.

Heat Race time came and we were feeling pretty racy. We started shotgun in the fast qualifier heat and of course, it took a little time to work our way to the front. We got into 2nd and ran hard to make it up to the leader's bumper coming out of turn 4 on the last lap, but didn't quite have enough momentum to get past the 92 of Molly Helmuth who took the win.

The main event was scheduled for 40 laps. We started in the back and Scott made some early moves to get forward quickly because lately we have been cut laps due to time constraints. We were moving forward and at one point had made a pass on another car, only to have him lift the car up in the next corner and drive right through us to take the spot back. Fortunately our driver is a great wheel man and saved it from going around. Unfortunately, the contact knocked the rear end out of kilter so the car wasn't as good as it had been earlier.

After the red flag, we found ourselves in 3rd on the restart when all hell broke loose going into turn one after taking the green. The car on the outside of the front row turned down into the car on the inside. The inside car tried to avoid contact and started to spin in front of Scott, who was hard on the brakes to avoid hitting him. However, the car behind Scott probably hadn't seen everything happening and hit him from behind, pushing Scott up into the mess. Again, Scott was able to keep the car straight and keep moving forward, avoiding the dreaded "involved" penalty of going to the back. The car had this time suffered quite a bit of damage and now the front toe was also out of sorts.

Looks bad, but we use lightweight bumpers because as JZ always says, "We build cars to win races, not crash!"

When they lined us back up, they told us they would be cutting 10 laps and we now had only 7 laps to go, not 17. We were now in first and Scott told me that he could feel that the car was now junk after all the wrecks. I let him know that, "We have the best driver and you will win this race no matter what the car feels like because you can make up for it's problems with skill and desire" and he didn't let us down. For 7 laps we fought off the 2nd place car, which was not suffering the handling woes we now had. Every lap in turn 1, he pounded our back bumper, but Scott knew it was coming and handled it perfectly, taking advantage of the boost to stretch out a little cushion each time coming off turn 2. Finally, we took the checkers for our 3rd win of the year and it may have been the most satisfying one yet!

We have 2 races left and are looking to finish the season strong. Next race is this Saturday, the 10th and Championship night is September 24th. We would love to see you all there for the next two races and send out your mojo to us to help power us to the championship!

See you at the races!