Saturday, July 27, 2002 - Park Jefferson Speedway
Heat - The night did not start out well, as before the heat race we attempted to time the car and struggled to do so. After the transmission problems we'd had last week, it turned out that our harmonic balancer had been broken. The crew worked their butts off to get on the track for the heat race, finally completing the needed repairs with literally seconds to spare. John drove to the lineup area sat for about 20 seconds and went onto the track. He started 5th and took it pretty easy on the car in the heat after the hasty repairs. He would advance to the feature with a 4th place finish. We were just happy to have made the heat and feature, and didn't really care what our finishing position was.
A Feature - John was slated to start 11th and after a first lap incident he would restart in 8th place. He quickly advanced up to 5th and was positioning himself for a pass on Denny Johnson for 4th when the car got away from him in turn 3. He spun out all on his own, for the first time in several years. His spin collected Kyle Koster and Rick Schau also but didn't cause any significant damage to the car. John would restart in 16th and was still very quick. He was able to advance to 8th place at the finish. We were quite disappointed in the finish given how fast our car was, it was easily a top-3 car tonight.
Standings - Kyle Koster would finish behind John in the feature and Jimmy Cole would run 3rd. Our 8th place finish was good enough to keep us in front of Kyle, but we would be tied with Jimmy for 2nd place in the standings. Rich Hesse had yet another top 5 finish, and extended his point lead even more. We feel pretty good about our chances to hold onto the 2nd position, but we'll need to break our streak of poor runs, and start putting together some more top-5's. |
