This past weekend we traveled to the Pocono International Speedway for NASA’s Grand Slam at Pocono. If I had it to do over again, I would probably never have loaded up the car and left the shop. Actually, it wasn’t that bad, but it was a very frustrating and mentally draining weekend.
We arrived early Saturday morning and unloaded for the day. I headed off to the drivers meeting and met up with a few drivers I knew. NASA was going to run Saturday clockwise on the “Long Course” and Sunday would be run counterclockwise. That’s pretty neat, because even though we are at the same track, it is very different to run the track opposite ways. After the drivers meeting, I headed back to the pits and met up with everybody.
The call came for us to head to pit road for practice and I climbed into the racecar and belted in. The crew unplugged the oil tank, and I fired up the engine. I looked over the gauges and everything was good to go. My guys pushed me out of our pit spot, and I shifted into 1st gear. About that time my weekend fell apart.
The car started to move, and then BANG. Catastrophic clutch failure. So. . . back to the pits and up on the lift. I changed out of my driver’s suit, and into my street clothes- I was part of the crew on this one. To make a very long and frustrating story short, I blew up the clutch. We were able to make repairs and get the clutch back together- but not before missing qualifying as well. We checked with race control, and they said that we would have to start at the back of a 40+ car field.
This wouldn’t have been so bad, if I would have had even a couple of laps on the speedway. I, however, had absolutely no track time in this car. We felt confident that we had the problems fixed, and again we were called out to pit lane to pre-grid for the race. This time, when I went to pull away, the car moved forward and got up to speed.
As we came off the last corner, which was NASCAR turn 1 backwards, the green flag was waving and the hammer went to the floor. I started passing cars and trying to get through the field. The tracks’ timing and scoring loop was down, so my crew was trying to count the positions I was making up. That doesn’t work very well on a 2.5 mile road course because you just can’t see the whole track. We thought we finished 14th, overall. In fact, I finished 7th, which meant in roughly 35 minutes, we passed over 30 cars and ran down the leaders. Not bad for not having a single lap on the speedway.
The bad news, the car started to shake and vibrate the last lap. That meant we were going to be tearing back into the transmission after the race. We let the racecar cool down, and once again started pulling parts back out and getting frustrated. We realized, about 2 hours into it, we didn’t have what we needed to fix the car. The bad news- we had to go back to the shop to get a whole new set-up, the good news- we only had a 2 hour trip.
Sunday morning had us once again fixed up and ready to go racing. This time, we made practice and we were happy with the car. Again, long story short, 3rd lap of qualifying. . . coming down the front straight- I shifted into 5th gear- BANG- but this time followed by a serious over-rev of the motor.
If you would have been at the track, at roughly you would have heard this whooshing sound. It was all of the air being let out of our sails. It was too much; I don’t think we could have handled anymore. But. . . once again, there we were. There we were, back in the pits, but this time in the rain and really- REALLY- upset.
The Race Director also announced at that time, that due to the weather, they would be moving the race up about an hour because of a thunderstorm headed towards the track. Back to square one. Only this time, we had half the time to fix it, and we had to fix it, because if we didn’t run at least half the race, we would be given a DNF for Sunday. Not something we could afford with Nationals in September.
My crew is the best. Hands down, they kept at it and never gave up. Even after the race started, they kept thrashing. In fact, as they were wrapping up, I climbed in and started getting strapped in, and somebody headed down to race control to notify them we were indeed heading out. My guys tightened the last bolt, let me down off the lift and race control gave us the green light at the end of pit road. We did, in fact, run over half the race. We salvaged a terrible day.
We salvaged an entire weekend. With everything that happened, we still managed to win our class on Saturday. We persevered and made the best of what we had to deal with. On the positive side, our engineers have already started working on finding a fix to the problem. I think, in the next couple of days, we will have found the cause of the problem, and the solution. All in plenty of time to test it out when we head back to Summit Point Raceway in August.
I want to thank our sponsors for the support this week. It makes it a lot easier to get through weekends like we had, when you know your sponsors are behind you. I will have updates next week about our progress with the car. Till next week. . .
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