So last time out was a struggle for sure. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have come out of there with a top-5 and the car in one piece. But we want to do better. On opening night we qualified 4th and made the Trophy Dash. I made a huge mistake on the final corner and lost the race. We should already have a trophy this season, if not for my mistake. I told the guys "We're gonna get one this year", and I meant it. But to do that, we need to get faster.
This class is not as easy as people think. There's always those that think this class is full of people who couldn't make it in other classes, but that's just not the case. These guys are serious, they race, they show up ready to go and they get it done. You gotta bring your A game if you want to compete with these guys. With that in mind, we gotta get faster. I'm not sure what that's gonna take, there's probably several areas I could point to that would each equal one tiny little improvement that eventually adds up to something bigger on the chart. Part of it starts with the driver, I gotta figure out how to be more consistent, find a line that actually works, hit my marks, all that stuff. I think I may have started to find something during that last half of the heat race. But the problem is, these guys will stick to the bottom worse than an old Texas catfish, so using a later entry into the corner is a bold move when you know they will try to take that tiny opening under you. So you have to use some caution at the same time, which usually doesn't equate to faster lap times.
We've got some ideas that we'd like to tweak on the setup too. Just some small things, I'm not ready to abandon the whole setup theory yet, but we clearly haven't hit on it either. We'll go to work and keep tweaking it and see if we can sneak up on it. I've spent far too many years constantly changing the setup theory, I'd like to just stick with this and keep working on it rather than constantly making wholesale changes. You can't get notes if you scrap the notebook every time.
The Speedway posted the updated points list as well. I'm not entirely sure how everything shook out, but we are still 7th in the points. I assumed we'd move up at least one spot with Logan Cole crashing out in practice and getting zero points on the night, but somehow we stayed 7th which means someone behind us must have moved ahead of us at the same time. I don't have a way to look at the points from the previous race, as those get replaced, so I'm not sure who jumped ahead of me. The end result is, we didn't move at all, still 7th. It's not all bad, as I mentioned Logan Cole dropped behind us having not received any points on the night. Logan dropped to 9th, 32 points behind us. What I believe is the other rookie, Eric Lee, is still in front of us, now in 5th place but only 6 points ahead of us instead of 8. So we only gained 2 points on him, as he both qualified in front of me and finished in front of me in the heat race (both qualifying and heat races pay points as well). So a net +2 to Eric and a big jump on Logan of a net +56 points to leapfrog him in the standings, but we remain 7th overall and 96 points back of the leader (we were 81 back previously for reference).
We have a couple weeks off before our next race on June 4th, so we'll take this coming weekend to go over the car again and get it prepped for that date. Ashley races her Mini Stock on the 28th, Memorial Day weekend, but I'm going to miss that one because I promised my wife I'd take her camping over the 3-day weekend. Racing is fun, but we need to remember that family is important as well and I need to tend to my marriage too. Race season has a way of taking over if you let it.