June 25th, Angola Speedway-HOSS
More details at the Angola Speedway website!!
Results
Angola Speedway, Angola, IN (3/8 mile paved)
Qualified: 13th, 12.654 sec
Heat: Started-2nd, Finished-6th
Feature: Started-13th, Finished-12th
Well, we got everything back together in time to go racing at Angola on Friday. We went through the
car very thoroughly when we put it back together, and it sure paid off. All day the car was very
stable and driveable. It was mostly me getting used to driving a car that was predictable. We did
not make any major changes throughout the night, so I could just get valuable seat-time. During our
qualifying run, the car did push really bad going into the first turn. It felt like the steering
seemed to lock in the center of the turn. I guess my first lap was quite a bit slower because of
that, but I was able to knock off a half-second for the second lap. Come to find out, the safety
strap we put on the steering drag-link have slid on the rod, causing the steering to bind up. With
that fixed, we went to the heat starting on the outside pole. Our time put us in with the fastest
cars of the night. There were 22 cars at the track, so everyone was probably going to start the
feature. I figured we'd just use the heat race to try out some different lines. On the start, I want
to see how the high line would work. It was too bad as I was able to stay with the pole sitter going
into 3. By the 2nd lap though, a couple of the faster cars had moved underneath me and past. I
decided to keep seeing how the 2nd groove would work though. The final faster car took a couple laps
to get by, even with me running the top groove. So I felt the car was handling pretty good. The last
couple laps I fell back in line and the other guys didn't pull away. For the feature, we lined-up
13th, and had a pretty good start. Many of the guys went up high on the back-stretch to sweep into
three. I was able to power on the inside though, and made up a lot of ground going into 3. The first
8-10 laps we raced pretty hard with 3 or 4 guys swapping positions back and forth around 10-13th
place. It was some really fun racing. About that time, the first caution came out when two cars got
together in 2, one guy spinning the other. On the restart, one guy was able to get past me again.
About a lap later another caution came out when another guy got spun a few spots in front of me. On
that restart, the car seemed to miss a little about half-way down the straights. We were halfway
through the race. I just had to go 15 more laps like that. The motor wouldn't always skip at the
same spot, so I figured it was something with the fuel. The last 15 laps were pretty uneventful, and
we finished up 12th. We were very happy with the night since we had a complete car after the race!
The only major problem of the day was we couldn't get our generator started for the longest time.
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