The 2022 race season has been over for a while now. We've moved firmly into the "off-season" at this point. This is when I start to reflect on my season and look back on how it went, what we accomplished and where we fell short. I tend to overthink most of this. I'm my own worst critic, so I tend to pick things apart and find the flaws. So, I thought I'd share my thoughts with you! 😋
Our 2022 schedule consisted of 12 races held over 10 race nights, with two of those race nights being "Twin Main" nights. The Twin Main nights would not include a heat race. We also had one "rain out" that was not rescheduled, shortening the season by one event. So this totals up 11 Main Events and 7 Heat Races. Since I' m a bit of a geek, I created a nice Excel Spreadsheet so I could sort all this info, and share it with you in a meaningful manner. 😎
Let's look at some numbers, shall we?
I think it would be good to start with some baseline info so we have something to measure against, right?
The 2022 season, after the rain out, had a grand total of 1000 points obtainable. That's the maximum amount of points you could obtain if you qualified 1st, won every Heat Race and won every Main Event. Yes, I've done the math, it's accurate. Okay, now we have something to measure against. Let's move forward.
I'll start with Qualifying, because that's where we start a race night. 😉
We opened up our season qualifying 4th on our first night, and subsequently placing us in the Trophy Dash, where I made a huge mistake and lost it literally in the final corner to the wily veteran Bob Fulmer. Fulmer has driven more laps at South Sound Speedway than I've watched from the stands, and he got me on the last lap. I remember climbing out of the car, looking at my crew and saying "We're gonna get one, mark my words. Before this season is done, we're gonna get one."
We accomplished that on the final night of the season, so I made my statement hold true. 😎
From that point on we never qualified outside the top ten and we qualified in the top five 4 times.
The track record was reset this season, and finished up at 14.946 seconds, set by Mike Duman. I typically struggle with qualifying, I don't know why. But our slowest qualifying effort this season was a 15.570 and our fastest qualifying effort was a 15.230. Every single race night we were between those lap times in qualifying, showing a very consistent car. Do I wish it was consonantly faster? Yeah, sure. But the car was consistent, that's a start. Also, we attempted to qualify for every race this season, which in my mind is a major accomplishment in itself.
All total, in qualifying alone, we scored 180 points out of a possible 312 for roughly 57.6% of all points possible. Plenty of room for improvement and we can see where we dropped a lot of points.
Let's look at Heat Races next, following the normal race night flow.
For Twin Main nights we don't run a Heat Race. So factoring in the one rain out night and two Twin Main nights, that left only seven nights of Heat Races.
Of those seven Heat Races, we won 2 of them and finished 2nd in two more for a total of four Top-5 finishes in Heat Races. Not bad at all, but a 7th place finish in one and a DNS in the last one shows another place where we dropped some points.
That being said, we gained 45 points in Heat Races out of a total of 88 available for roughly 51% of all possible points there. Heat Races were my bane, for sure. Things can go wrong in a hurry and my luck usually finds me in them when it goes wrong. 😒
That leaves the big money moment, those Main Events. 😎
With 11 total Main Events after the one Rain Out, we failed to grab a win. I state that because at the end of the day a race car driver is judged on wins. Not grabbing a win will be the one thing everybody will remember, whether you want them to or not. People only remember the guy who won, not the guy who ran 3rd all season (not that we ran 3rd all season, just saying). Think about it this way, Ryan Blaney finished the NASCAR Cup Series regular season 2nd in points but had zero wins. Nobody will talk about him, nobody will remember the fact that he was 2nd in points at the cutoff for the Chase. They just remember the guys who won a race. So in my book, not winning a race is a fail.
That being said, let's try to look at some positives. We finished six Main Events in the Top-5 and eight of the eleven Main Events in the Top -10. The only Main Events that we did not finish in the Top-10 were the one that we DNF'd (Did Not Finish) and the two that we DNS'd (Did Not Start).
We gained a total of 420 points in Main Events out of a possible 600, so that's a solid improvement in that column. This totals roughly 70% of all possible points from Main Events, so a notable increase.
I tend to do better when I have some time to let the car come to me, or let the race sort itself out. But with two races that we didn't even start and one we didn't finish, it's easy to see where the loss of points came from.
Totaling all this up, we earned a total of 645 points out of a possible 1000, for some easy math of 64.5% of all total points gained. The 2022 Season Champion, Dominic Hunter, gained 852 total points for 85% of all possible points. That's a pretty good percentage, and if we want to look at things a bit differently, we gained roughly 75% of the points that Dominic gained. That's not too bad for our first full season in this class, right?
Now, let's talk about some goals I had set, because I like to put undue pressure on myself. 😟
The first goal I had set was to win Rookie Of The Year. In every class I've run, this one has eluded me even worse than the Championship. So this one was a pretty serious goal for me.
The other goal that I had kind of set, without really saying much about it, was to finish in the Top-5 in points. It's a lofty goal when you literally have no clue how you stack up in a new class with a new car, but one I had in the back of my mind from the get-go. Of course, the big wreck that caused our DNF on opening night really kicked that goal right in the teeth. 😒
So let's talk about that Rookie Of The Year thing first. In the end, we accomplished that one. Not in the manner that I wanted to, but we got there. I had a very tough, very tight battle going with Logan Cole for most of the season. Things got much tighter towards the end of the season and I think at one point we swapped the lead back and forth every night for three nights, right up to the point where he had a huge wreck that destroyed his car and they chose to park it rather than fix it. Thus, I kind of won this one by default when Logan stepped out of the battle. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of this one. But I would have been much happier battling with him to the end. It was fun running with Logan, and I was sad to see his season end like that.
Okay, the other goal. 🙄
Like I said, opening night was really a gut punch to this one. We also had two other Main Events that we had mechanical problems and didn't start, so there's a lot of dropped points to show here. In the end, we literally came up 1 point short, finishing 6th in the overall standings after another driver was DQ'd several days after Championship Night. I think my frustration here is, and I've spoken with the track promoter about it, I was very seriously points racing that night and by my math we looked good. But apparently I was the only one who didn't know that this other racer was not racing for points due to an illegal part. So my math was wrong, because apparently everybody except for me knew about the illegal part. I don't know why I wasn't included in this information, and when asked about it I was told "He spoke to everyone, so everyone knew and everyone agreed". Umm...no, I didn't know, so he in fact did not speak to "everyone", nor did "everyone" agree.
So this one has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth and reminds me why I chose not to run South Sound Speedway for so many years.
The next event will be our South Sound Speedway Awards Banquet on December 3rd, where I will collect my last two awards. From there we start looking at 2023. As I begin looking ahead, I'm not real sure what my plans are. My car is currently not legal for VMRA, so that means I'm kind of stuck at South Sound Speedway unless VMRA decides to let me run with them. But that isn't looking too good at this point, so we'll just have to wait and see how things play out. In the mean time, I'm looking forward to the banquet. 😎