Saturday was a tough night at the track. We finally had good weather and after making some changes to the car that we had high hopes would help us out, we joined the rest of the field at South Sound Speedway for race #6 of the 2022 season.
Early practice was a mixed bag. I felt like the car was good, certainly better than it had been. But I also felt like the track was hot and slick and we were mostly just chasing it for no good reason. But we kept at it until we felt like we had a good car. With things looking decent, we got ready for qualifying. I always struggle with qualifying, I don't know why, I just do. Other teams can do things to their cars that make them a few tenths faster, I've never figured out how to do that. If I knew how to make my car faster, I'd make it faster all the time. But for whatever reason, everyone usually runs a couple tenths faster in qualifying and I just...don't.
Also, I felt like the track changed or something as well, because the car wasn't the same. It was back to being very tight in the middle and then loose off, something we've been fighting all year. In the end, we wound up 8th overall, out of 14 cars. Not great, especially since I'm pretty sure we were quicker than that earlier in the day. I just don't know how to get the car to be faster for qualifying. It races better than it qualifies, but that's been the case with my car all my life. Some day I'll figure it out...or maybe not. 😕
After qualifying I felt like we might have some sort of clutch issue, as the pedal didn't feel right. I asked the guys to go under it and take a look, make sure everything was tight and all that. Apparently it's a good ting I did, because Tommy found a bearing on the driveshaft yoke. It seems that the transmission had spit out the bearing that the output shaft rides on, so with that bearing no longer where it resides, the entire output shaft was wobbling around. The entire transmission could have come apart at any minute. So in short, with no backup transmission to swap out real quick, we were done. We missed the heat race and the main event.
So, with a massive hit in the points, we've dropped to 9th in the overall standings from our previous position of 7th. The bigger issue is that we've dropped behind the other two rookies once again, with Eric Lee still holding down 5th place and Logan Cole moving back in front of us in 8th place. But with a huge hit in points we've dropped 49 points behind Eric Lee, losing 41 points on the night to him and Logan moves 9 points in front of us from his previous 47 points behind us. We are also trailing the points leader by 148 points now from our previous 81 point deficit, not that I'm really tracking that because there was really no way to make that up anyways. So in short, we took a roughly 40 point hit on the positions that mattered. I'm beginning to see that this season is slipping away and we will not reach our goal. We've reached the half way mark of the season, from here the races start coming a lot faster as we move to the "every other week" schedule for the remainder of the calendar. We're way down, and running out of time. We may be just focusing on staying in the top-10 for the season trophy at this point.