Saturday, August 3, 2002 - Park Jefferson Speedway
Heat - You'll start to sense a trend here as our bad luck continued tonight. After the problems with the harmonic balancer the previous week we put in our spare engine. What we didn't know until Thursday night when we were putting the engine in was that the place where the Harmonic balancer bolt attaches to the crank had been stripped out and retapped, requiring an extra long bolt. What we found was that such a bolt was not readily available and we were forced to make our own. When John went out for the heat race the car ran well, but upon returning to the pits, we found that the bolt had broken. Again the scramble was on. We looked briefly for a new bolt, but realized that no one else would have one either our only choice before the heat race was to re-weld the bolt we had, fortunately we were able to get the broken portion out of the crank to try again. When we went out for the heat race, John ran well, not pushing the car but coming home in 3rd from his 5th place start. But again upon returning to the pits we noticed that the bolt had again broken.
A Feature - John was qualified for the feature, but didn't have a car. We weren't going to risk losing an engine by running with the broken bolt for the 17 lap feature, so we did something that we'd never done in our 12 years of racing. We went looking for a car to borrow for the feature. The first person we asked was Mark Wagner, who gratefully was willing to give up his car for John to run the feature. John would need to start in the rear (21st) but at least he would be in the field. Mark had told John that his car doesn't like to run low and he'd be better off up high. John tried to go low early on, but found that Mark was right (go figure?) and the top line was definitely the preferred line. John had moved up to 12th in the first several laps, but entered turn 1 too high, and went over the top, making it all the way to the road, John kept going and came back on the track one lap down, since the yellow was never thrown. He would run all the way to the finish among the lead cars, and finish 12th 1 lap down. The 12th place got us 28 valuable points rather than the zero we would have had if we would have sat the feature out. I'll say it again...thanks Mark!.
Standings - Kyle Koster and Jimmy Cole would both have strong runs and would pass John in the standings as he slid to 4th place, but was still only 14 points out of 2nd. Boy do we need to get on better terms with Lady Luck and soon! |
