April 17th, 2011 - Rockford Speedway Recap

This weekend was a bit up and down for us. Every year Rockford Speedway allows teams from the Spring Classic, to come down and practice a day early to prepare for Sunday's race. We braved a wintery storm in Minnesota, and drove through a mess in the early morning to get to the track in Love's Park, Illinois. They call the track "wreckford", but the drive over was probably scarier than the 1/4 mile paved oval we were heading to.

We got there in time for practice on Saturday, and it was raining and snowing most all afternoon. By about 3pm, we finally got to go out there and turn some laps. The car felt and looked like it hadn't missed a beat from last year. We were turning lap times faster than we had in both trips to Rockford in 2010. So we packed it up early on Saturday with high hopes for Sunday.

Sunday came and it was still freezing outside, but no rain in sight at least. In our second warmup session, we ended up breaking a suspension component on the front of our car, and it totally threw off our setup of the car. It felt like the whole morning we were scrambling to get back to where we were on Saturday. We qualified 16th fastest out of 30, and were just extremely unhappy with that when we knew we were at least a top 5 car in practice on Saturday. We went on to the heat race, and the car just still wasn't right, and we ended up blowing a tire and had to pull off early.

In a scramble to figure things out for the feature, we got out there just as they were doing introductions and had to start in last place, which was 20th. Even though the car wasn't perfect, we ran hard in the race, picking cars off one at a time. We had made it up to 9th place with about 10 laps to go, and settled for 10th when we lost a spot when we were challenging for 7th and 8th position on the inside.

All in all, we were happy with the result based off of where we started the race at. We passed alot of good cars to get up to our finishing position, with an ill handling machine. Our expectations heading to Rockford were higher, but the car didn't get beat up, and I'm proud of Don and T.R. for working so hard to put the best car out there that we could for the feature.

When we got home we took a look at the car on Monday and found that our right front screw jack had somehow been spun out about 5 to 6 rounds, which drops the height on that corner about an inch. It explains alot to us on why the car was acting the way it was, but we just don't know what, or potentially, who, turned that out on us. We know what we have to do to fix it, and we'll learn for next time.

Next up is Norway Speedway in Norway, Michigan. That track has become a new "home track" for us. We feel more comfortable there then we do even at Elko Speedway. We're hoping for some redemption after a win was stolen from us in Norway last year.