Race #15 at Orlando Speedworld
11-05-05

I know it's been 2 weeks since I last wrote a report but, let me tell you, we have been busy.

After we got home from Georgia we checked the car over and then went to New Smyrna Speedway for practice on Thursday night. We decided to put the set up back in the car that the spring company suggested and work with it a little bit to see if we could make it work.

One of the things that we hadn't been paying a lot of attention to was rear tire stagger. This time we stretched the right side tires a little to get about an inch more stagger. Bingo! That was what we needed. You see I was saying that the car felt loose and it was (I know what I'm talking about!) but my crew chief was watching the car in the turn and so was the drivers behind me and they all thought that the car was tight. They were right too. It was both lose and tight. When we got the stagger up to around 2 inches the car just settled right down and then we put in some more cross weight to tighten it up and I was on a rail. I kept driving the car deeper into the turns and picking up the throttle sooner and sooner. Aftet the last practice session, my crew chief said he was never so glad to see the yellow flag come out because he was sure I was going to drive the thng in until either it broke or I hit the wall.

We went home and scaled the car again to see where everything was at and then on Wednesday we went to Orlando to test the new set up there. Orlando isn't as banked as New Smyrna and the car started to get tight in the center again. We scratched our head and tried different springs and stuff but it just had a funny feeling in the center of the turns where it seemed that I lost the feel of the front tires for a split second until I got back in the gas and then it wanted to hug the bottom as it came off the turn. We came home sort of scratching our heads again.

Then we got smart. We set the car up on ramps so we could get under it with the car sitting on the tires and the springs and we started at the rear and worked our way through every adjustment to the front. The first thing we found was that we had the lower control arms on the rear end too low and the rear end was steering the car to right at the end of the body roll. We fixed that and squared up the rear end again. Then we checked every thing in the front end. Usually we set the caster with the car on jack stands but this time we check it with the car on the ground. Whoops! That makes a pretty big difference. We had no caster in either side! Once we got that set properly we found that everything else was pretty close.

On Saturday we were ready to go by noon so we left early to try to get a little bit of additional practice in before the race. In the first time out the car was consistent with no weird feeling in the center of the turn which was good but the car was tight all through the turn. We keep coming in and raising the panhard bar and taking cross weight out and each time the car got a little better. Then, I tried something that my crew chief was telling me to do. When the car was tight in the center he asked me what the car did when I got back on the gas. I said it loosened it up so he thought I should just slam the gas down and make the car turn that way. Before, the car felt so unstable I wasn't real excited about trying that but, since the car was now consistently tight, I thought I would give it a try. When I did, the car came to life!

I was coming off the turns like a rocket which was real good except the track decided to let a few dwarf cars out on the track at the same time I was and there was this one guy who had never driven one of these cars before out there. I came up on him like a shot out of a cannon and about the time I jumped back in the gas in turn 3 he spun his car sideways in front of me. I didn't even have time to get to the brake. I hit him broadside in the drivers door and folded up my front bumper. The good thing was that he was OK and was able to drive off the track and so was I.

We drilled out the rivets that hold the nose on my car and my crew chief straightened up the bumper while I straightened up and reattached the body panels. In about 30 minutes we had it back together and you couldn't even tell we had a wreck.

My mom pulled the pill for me since I was sort of busy putting the car back together and she doesn't have the same touch that I do. She got me the 6th starting position of 6 cars in the first heat, that's last. I had one car in front of me that I was sort of concerned about but I didn't miss a gear or anything like that and on the start I got to the bottom and came out in 4th place. In turn 3 I didn't realize that the 3rd place car was out side of me and I thought I had hit the wall but it was him. I guess he backed out of it after that so I got the 3rd position and then we went on to finish the heat in that order.

That put me 3rd in the inside row for the feature but then one of the racers who was on the pole had to leave to take his wife to the hospital. That moved me up to 2nd on the inside for the start. When the green flag fell I stayed with the pole sitter into turn one but he pulled me off in turn 2 while the outside pole sitter held his spot and fell in between us. We ran the whole race like that lapping a few of the cars twice. My car was awesome considering that the motor is getting pretty tired and I just don't have the horsepower that the other 2 had. I guess there was a lot of racing going on behind me but I was trying my best to stay with the 2nd place car. On about lap 15 I noticed the 4th place car was gaining on me but I could tell he was pretty lose off the corners. I, on the other hand, was starting to tighten up a little bit. I figured that he couldn't get by me if I held my line. He would run me down on the straight aways but couldn't get in the gas to pass me coming off. Then we caught some lap cars with 2 to go and that spread us out a little bit so I was able to bring it home in 3rd.

What a way to finish up the season. I don't know what we would have done if it had been 3 weeks ago when the car was so out to lunch. I think my crew chief was ready to quit then but I am sure glad we keep trying. We have a lot of work to do this winter to get the car ready for next year so we needed the motivation of a good race like this to keep us pumped up.

Man it's been a great year. I've learned so much. I've meet so many cool people and made a lot of new friends. I have to tell you, I had no idea what a challenge this would be to move up to a TQ. We looked at a lot of different cars to race and we could have made a big mistake with a few of the ones we considered but the TQ has turned out to be just what I need to move on to the next level in racing.

We're going to put the car away for a few weeks and then the PRI show is in Orlando this year so we are going to go over there and look around. Come the first of December we will strip the car down and paint the frame, then rebuild the rear end and the front end, and then install our new ZX10 motor. We have to replace the sides and the nose and I've got a couple ideas for some new graphic so we will be replacing the vinyl as well. Hopefully we'll be ready to run a few practice laps in late January or early February. Our next race is Speedweeks at Orlando Speedworld on February 8 through the 11th. See you there!