After another disappointing race in Topeka the decision was made to abandon the new combination that was installed in our car at the beginning of the season, we had thought we could take what we had and make it a bit better by changing a few things in the engine and clutch combination.
I guess we were wrong. With about half the initial part of our season behind us we decided the testing would have to end, we can't afford to give away anymore races and should go back to what we know and have had success with, probably a decision that needed to be made a few races ago.
In returning to last year's set up you would think it would be easy to go back but in reality it is a little more difficult than you would think, when you change engine combinations things like connecting rod length and piston height change and you order enough of these components to last quite a while so you are forced to juggle a few things in order to try and replicate what you had before, as far as the clutch department goes you have reverse the changes you have made in how we apply it, flows, weights and on top of all that clutch discs have changed since the previous season and that is always a wild card.
In addition when you did make changes like that you would really like to be able to test them, make a few runs to try and get a baseline before heading to a national event, unfortunately for us with testing not being allowed due to a shortage of nitromethane, the fuel we use to power our cars we would have to go to Chicago cold turkey and use qualifying to get a baseline. I hoped we would get a quick handle on it.
Once again I was wrong. We struggled in qualifying. In trying to get our car back to last year's set up we struggled initially to make power, the conditions were very difficult, high temperatures, a lot of humidity, the corrected altitude was as high as we have seen all year and the car just wouldn't respond to the changes we made and we made slow runs on all of our qualifying attempts. We ended up 16th and that means we would face the #1 qualifier on race day.
As the #1 qualifier Tony Schumacher is always a tough draw, they have been the dominant car in our class for years but for some reason we have faired well against them, especially when we get them first round. We studied our set up made another change that we thought would fix the power problem and got ready for first round. The changes we made did fix the power problem, unfortunately they fixed it too well, it actually made too much power and smoked the tires at the hit of the throttle, Tony had similar problems downtrack and seeing that I jumped back into the gas and tried to chase him down and unfortunately came up just a little bit short. I am hoping that we now have our engine combination back and am cautiously optimistic about heading to Englishtown, we need a good race to get our season on track. As I said in the previous race report our merchandise and team apparel is now available through the UPS Oasis system so all those that have asked please utilize that for your purchases.
Thanks for reading,