Race #5 at New Smyrna Speedway
10-28-06 - VIDEO

I know finishing 11th out of 13 cars doesn't sound like a great accomplishment but I think I made some progress in a few areas and this time it wasn't all my fault that I didn't finish better.

My dad keeps telling me that the wins will come when we are ready. I've found out that being ready to win is not just wanting to win. It's going to take a lot more than just desire... (more)

It's easy to say that you have to go slow to go fast but there is lot more to it than that. It feels to me more like I have had to take a step back to take a step forward. It's like I am learning to drive all over again from a different mind set. Finishing is all I think about now. If I finish and I'm the leader then I've won the race, but if I just finish that's a good race too. Now that we are finishing races we can start to work on finishing better. This is all part of the go slow to go fast way of thinking and I think I'm finally getting it.

First, let me tell you about the last 3 weeks. We unloaded the car on Sunday morning after the 50 lap race and looked around to see what needed to be done to fix the damage I did when I went off the track on lap 43. At first it looked like I only did a little cosmetic damage but when we started the motor up water came running out of the exhaust pipe and the radiator was dripping too. The car was running pretty hot at the end of the race and I guess I should have come in after the spin because once we got to looking around we found out that we had blow both head gaskets and punched a hole in the radiator.

It was a good thing that we had 3 weeks off to fix it because we had to pull the heads and check to make sure that they weren't cracked. Then we replace the head gaskets and put the engine back together again. And, then we changed the oil twice to get all the water out of the engine. Finally, we put in a new radiator in addition to replacing all the supports on the nose piece. Everything went back together pretty well and the motor seemed to run as good as it did before. Now for the race.

Once again, we didn't have a heat race. Just a few practices and then straight into the feature. To make things a little worse they cut our feature to 15 laps so they could run a make up race from a few weeks ago. I went out for the first practice on old tires and there was water weeping out of the cracks in the pavement caused by a heavy rain they had at the track that morning. Still, the tires felt pretty good so we decided to run the old tires instead of using up a new set for just a 15 lap race.

In the driver's meeting they said that, since the track was weeping so badly, we would have all single files starts. When I got back to the line up board I found I was starting the race in 4th. We looked at the other cars behind me and knew that there were at least 4 cars that were really fast so we figured I should be able to finish the race in 8th or 9th place.

Just as we thought, 3 cars went by me right on the start, but after that I settled in I was doing pretty good at staying close behind them in 7th place. Then, at about half way, my motor started to slow a little coming off the corners. I held on as best I could but 2 cars went blowing by me on the back stretch. With 2 laps to go I was in 9th place and then the caution came out for a spin. When we restarted the race my car just didn't want to go at all and 2 more cars got by me going into turn one. It was a good thing the race was over on the next lap otherwise I think I would probably have lost another position but I held on to finish the race in 11th place.

Towards the end of the race I felt a bad vibration in the right rear and I could feel it in the shifter as well so we thing I have something wrong in the rear end or the transmission. Maybe even the engine, but I don't know yet. We are going to get unloaded and take a look and see today.

All in all I think I did a pretty good job with the track weeping and the old tires and a motor that was laying a down a little bit. I know I could have pushed the car a little harder than I did, especially in the beginning, but I'm just going to keep focusing on running good smooth laps and getting a little faster each week. Hopefully, we can find out what the problems are with my car and get them fixed quickly because my next race is next week.