Friday, April 27, 2001 - Crawford County Speedway (Denison, IA)
Heat - John kicked off the 2001 season starting 5th in the 2nd modified heat race at Denison. Our only previous visit to this track was our first night out in the the 2000 season with our Harris Modified. John fell back to 6th at the start, but the car was very quick and he quickly moved up to the 5th position and passed for the 4th position on the final lap to take one of the 6 transfer spots to the A-main. He got to redraw for starting position in the feature, and drew the 12, the worst possible position. John drove a good race and the car was very fast. It was a good way to start off the 2001 campaign.
A Feature - With 22 cars present for the night's racing all 22 were able to start the feature. John started 12th and fell back to 13th on the first lap. The car was very fast in the early going and John steadily picked off one car a lap until reaching the 9th position. At that point the track really started to dry out and the car started to get extremely loose. John was unable to gain any really good forward traction anywhere on the track and was really using up his tires attempting to do so, as the 20 lap feature wore down, John had slid back to the 13th position. We learned some lessons about how the track behaves at Denison, and will be more prepared for the dry track in coming weeks. Joe Kramer's #74k won the race, Charlie Clark ran 2nd, Greg Peck finished 4th, Gary March was 6th, and Rich Hesse finished 10th.
We will take a week off before returning to Denison on May 11th. |
