It was a night full of struggles, but we capped it off with a decent finish. Let's talk about how we got there.
Our first practice session saw us fight some carburetor problems that we didn't know we had. It's always funny how you can look everything over in the shop and the engine will run great, but once you put it under a load out there on the track it does weird things. At first we thought maybe there was a problem in the jets, we had been rejetting it last time out and thought maybe we just went too small and it was starving it. Then we thought maybe it was a problem with all the gaskets from the float bowls being taken off and put back on so many times, so we changed all the gaskets. Something made it start working right, so we called it good and moved on. I'm leaning towards the gasket issue, we've clearly got it jetted too rich right now judging from the exhaust pipe and the throttle response off the corners. But too rich is better than too lean, so we'll err on the side of safety for a bit here and just know that it's one more tiny thing causing us lap time. 😉
Once we had the engine actually running, we found the car was just not handling very well. It had rained all week and a couple days that rain was really hard, so the track had gotten a good scrubbing all week and probably had next to zero rubber on it. Plus, the weather was acting goofy and it was not exactly warm out, so that doesn't help either. My car was very tight in the middle and then rather loose off. The general consensus from everyone else was basically the same thing, everyone was fighting tight in the middle and loose off. The only problem was, they were also all faster than me. I don't mind the track being junk, it's junk for everyone. What sucked was, they seemed to be handling it better and I was...to be frank...lost. Every adjustment we tried to make had basically no effect on the handling, it just felt the same. There was one glimmer of hope when we made a fairly big tire stagger change and I could actually feel the difference that made. But it wasn't enough to make up the numbers on the chart as we were still a solid half a second too slow.
At some point you just figure "this is what we've got" and do the best you can, and that's kind of how we approached qualifying. And, it turned out about how you'd expect for a team struggling to find any sort of balance in the car. We were a solid half a second too slow and I ended up 7th out of the 8 cars that showed up. Almost last, great. 🙄
This also put me on the outside of the front row for the heat race, as we had a full invert. So, you've got guys behind you that are way faster and they want around! But, balance that with the fact that the heat race awards points, and I need those! It's a fun position to be in. How hard do you want to race for a couple points?
The leader rolled to a very slow start for the heat race and I didn't fire off very well, so I started falling back almost immediately. Stuck on the high side with no real grip, you just kind of try to be cautious and find a spot to fall in line when you can. When my spotter cleared me I got to the bottom, but by that time I was well out of the top-5, which is where the points stop. From there it was more a learning session for me to try and find some sort of a line around this place, which I'm still learning. Believe it or not, this is probably only about my 8th time ever actually racing on this track, having come here very sparingly since about 2009. I just don't have many laps here, and it has changed so drastically over those years, I'm still very lost out there.
moving on to the main event, I once aging found myself starting outside of the front row, same leader on the inside. Oh great, it went so well last time. 🙄
The car was still just way too tight in the middle and still loose off. It seemed like our adjustments were just being outrun by a changing track, or they just had zero effect still. I decided to just do some drastic adjustments to the car to help it rotate in the middle. I told the crew what I wanted and we all agreed it was not the proper adjustments, nor was it anything I'd recommend, but it was one of those last minute "we're out of ideas" deals and we just started throwing crutches at it in the hopes something would help it rotate.
The leader chose to roll a much faster start this time, after his back bumper was pretty much beat in on that heat race start, and I got a good jump on the green flag and cleared him coming into turn 3 to take the lead. Cool, we're out front! I know this ain't gonna last, but man we look cool for a little bit here! 😎
I led the first few laps before the fast guys started getting loose back there and they started coming around me. I knew it would happen, so again, just set your car in easy and don't do stupid things. Once the train started coming by on the inside I knew I was a sitting duck. At some point my spotter cleared me once again and I dropped back into line, somewhere once again out of the top-5. I think I fell back to 7th or 8th (last) before things started to stabilize. The car started to come to me and guys started dropping off at about lap 15 of this 35 laps race. Looking over the lap charts today, it looks more like my car didn't fall off as much as everyone else. They all fired off way faster than me and then slowed down over the course of the race, while I maintained a fairly consistent pace. Finding myself 6th after a couple guys dropped off, I started running down 5th place and managed to make a pass on him with only a couple laps left to move into 5th place for the finish.
It wasn't pretty, but it is a top-5! We struggled all night, we never could find the balance in the car, I felt completely lost out there until about lap 20 of the main event. But in the end, we had a decent night. We grabbed a top-5 out of thin air, we loaded up a car with no marks on it at all and we head back to the shop not needing to repair anything. We can just focus on tweaking the setup to try and get better. It's nice when you don't have a huge pile of repairs to make.
We've got some ideas on what may help the setup work better, we'll regroup and start making some tweaks. Our next race is a couple weeks out, on June 4th, so we've got a bit of time to go over it. Hopefully we can start making some in-roads on those fast guys, because right now they are really fast!