Memorial Day weekend update

Another weekend started at Lernerville Speedway on Friday night; with a 2nd place finish in the heat race we prepped the car for the feature event. We had to start in 12th place due to winning the prior week. As the race started, the car had a comfortable feel to it, as it had in the previous weeks. Several laps into the race a competitor hit a slick spot in turn three, as he slid up the track he made contact with my left front wheel and the contact caused me to spin out over turn three. I restarted at the rear of the field and worked my way back to a 5th place finish. The car did not have a good feel to it after the contact, and when I returned to the pit area, I found that the front radius rods that hold the front axle had been bent. The run wasn’t my best, but with the car bent we were satisfied. Saturday Morning the crew and I went to work fixing damage from the night before and prepping the car for BRP Tour race #2 at Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway. This was our first trip to this track; it’s a super big and wide ½ mile speedway. I started my heat race on the outside pole, I was running the low side of the speedway and was all over the leader the whole race, just couldn’t hold my run off turn 4 to make the pass, so we settled for 2nd place. I redrew # 7 starting spot for the main event, again as the event started I continued to work the bottom, and had worked my way into 3rd place, then I moved to the top and was riding to conserve my tires. I was slightly concerned about tire wear because of never racing there before and the surface was slick. With around 10 laps to go there was a long red flag, due to a major wreck, under the red, my tires had went down in pressure due to being so hot and cooling off, so when we restarted I had to be cautious, as the green flew the car in front of me had a problem, and the start was bottled up really bad. I fell back to about 7th, so I had changed my lines and worked the car all over the speedway surface to work my way back up to a 4th place finish. As I crossed the flag stand taking the checkered flag and entered turn one, my right rear tire exploded. Luck wasn’t completely on our side, but after that I was very happy with the finish, could have been worse if the tire let go earlier. Sunday we headed to Tri-City Speedway for BRP Tour race # 3, the crew did all the maintenance, while I prepped tires for the evening’s event. We started 6th in our heat race and finished 3rd, for the feature event we had to redraw and I pulled a number # 7 again. This race was plagued with cautions, and our car was much better on green flag runs. I had worked my way into 2nd place on lap 25, with two laps to go, again there was a red flag, this time the tires weren’t the issue, just the limited laps made it hard to get a run on the leader, so we settled for a 2nd place finish. We took over the BRP Tour points lead after race # 3, it’s still very early in the season, but we are happy to be on top the points with a 3 point lead over second place. Race # 4 for the tour will be this Friday night at Lernerville Speedway. Then Saturday night we will be headed back to central NY to Canandaigua Speedway. I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend; also I would like to thank Pat Macaulay and Bruce Harwood for all their help this past weekend. Later , Del