So yea, that didn't go as planned...at all! 😒
I'll be honest with you, I don't really even know what to say here. I'm actually still a bit shell-shocked to be totally honest. One minute I had a perfectly good racecar, the next minute our entire season was trashed. And the worst part is, I saw it coming the whole way. 🙄
We arrived at South Sound Speedway with a decent car, it wasn't awesome, but after what we had been through on opening night, it was something we could race and be proud of. To me, that was good enough. Let's just get things back on track and start looking for small victories. Maybe a top-10, maybe even a top-5, I'd settle for just finishing a race and taking a completely running car back home at this point. Small victories.
I took the car out in the first practice session just to see if anything would fall off, or if we had an oil leak or anything like that. Let's just shake the car down and see what we're dealing with here. It was a very hot day and there's really no reason to chase the setup through the hot afternoon. Let's see what we've got, make sure everything works and then maybe do some small adjustments or fix any issues that we find. I wasn't really up to full speed yet, but it was clear the car was very tight in the middle. I mean, really tight! I decided to set it in a bit hotter on about lap 5 or so, just to see if maybe I was slowing it down to much and causing it to be tight. I don't know, it could happen I suppose. So I set it into turn 3 a bit hotter and it did what I kind of expected it to do, she got loose and started coming around on me. For a second I thought about trying to drive out of it, but I chose to just bring it on around and regroup. It seemed like the safer choice. I'm pretty known for pushing the car in practice until I spin it going in, trying to find "the edge", and then you back up a bit from there. So this isn't anything new for me, I've literally done it a hundred times. I brought it on around and locked it down, holding the brake to let everyone else choose a way around me. Yellow flag was out, lights flashing all around the Speedway, there I sit watching everyone go around me. Then I saw it...the last guy in the field, who was clear over in turns 1 & 2 when I spun. He came blasting down the back straight, set his car into turn 3 at full speed and then panicked. I even said to myself "There it is, there's the one" as I watched him coming straight at me.
This is a series of pics taken by the track photographer. Keep in mind, the yellow had been out, lights flashing, before this first pic, I had been sitting there under yellow from the time this first car (the blue/white one up high) was back on the back straight -
This guy hit me so hard it tore the whole left front suspension up, ripped the door bar (the "rub rail" down the side of the car, keeps the decals from getting torn up) out of the frame and caved in the bodywork behind the front tire -
So the final outcome is, the wheel, brake rotor, spindle, shock and upper a arm are all completely junked. The body work is torn up, the door bar is junked. The bigger issue is the damage done to our season. I had set out to win "Rookie of the Year" this year. After our opening night mess we were already way behind in the points. This deal happening in practice meant that we didn't get to participate in ANY of the event, we missed qualifying, heat races and the main. We basically lost an entire event. So now the math doesn't add up. We can't recover from this far behind. Basically, we simply can't get there from here.
Tallying up the damage from this season, the blown engine on opening night, the trashed rear suspension that same night, all this damage to the front suspension, we're in the hole about $10,000 so far and that doesn't take into account the two broken transmissions and two drivelines that we destroyed at the end of last season trying to get ready for this season. So with that in mind, I have chosen to pull the plug in this season. I was running a borrowed engine after losing our engine on opening night. There's simply no reason to risk something going wrong to that borrowed engine if we can't reach the goal we had set anyways. I'm just not gonna do it. Jeff was very gracious in loaning me his engine to keep my dream alive. If I can't achieve that goal, I'm not risking his engine.
Having only run a single race this year, I can still come back in 2022 as a rookie and maybe try again. I don't know. We've spent a lot of money already, we've tapped ourselves out pretty bad. I may need to just call it good and start looking at winding down my racing. Money isn't as easy to come by as it used to be, this isn't a cheap hobby. People who think it's easy don't really understand the amount of time, effort and dollar bills it takes to operate these things. I don't cheap out on this stuff, that wheel was a light weight wheel, that spindle was a high end light weight spindle. I don't generally put junk on my cars, people may think I'm running low-budget stuff, but it's not the case. I say all the time "If I've only got one bullet I want it to be the best bullet I can chamber." These parts aren't cheap, when you tear them up it hurts. I need to take a seriously hard look at everything and start considering where I go from here. But for now, my 2021 racing season is over, I'm gonna load up my camper and go spend some time with my wife.
I do want to give a huge Thank You to all of my sponsors. This season did NOT go as planned, it was cut WAY too short and I really don't have the words to describe how absolutely gutted I feel. I'm still in shock over all of this, I'm just completely devastated, my stomach has this massive pit in it and I still feel like I want to puke every time I think about it. To say this is eating me up is an understatement. I feel like I've let every one of you down and I don't know what to say, other than thank you for your support and I wish I could have done better. You guys deserve more than I delivered, and for that I apologize. 😢
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