Tri-County Speedway: Back From Scratch and Building Block
This weekend at Tri-County Speedway was a building block. It wasn’t the flashiest result on paper, but it was exactly the kind of weekend that gets a team moving back in the right direction. Sometimes the story isn’t about the finish, it’s about everything that had to happen just to get there. 🏁
A Rough Start to the Day
We got to the track Saturday morning, ready to roll, and then the second practice happened. A shock broke on us out there, and we had to pull the car in right away. From that point on, we were pretty much starting from scratch.
There wasn’t a lot of time to figure it out either. We only had about 15 to 20 laps left before qualifying to get the car back to where it needed to be. That’s not much room for error when you’re trying to rebuild confidence in the setup on the fly, but the team buckled down and made it work.
Qualifying Felt Good
We ended up qualifying 8th out of 16 cars. Considering everything that happened in practice just a little while before, that felt really good heading into the race. It told us the changes we scrambled to make were in the right direction.
This was our first real race back since the shock problem started giving us trouble. That issue had been hurting us for the past three races straight, so finally being able to move forward, recoup some of what we lost, and make real progress again meant a lot to all of us. 🙌🏼
A Battle All Race Long
We started 8th and quickly worked our way up into 6th early on, which was a great sign. After a restart, though, we got caught 3-wide and ended up getting shuffled back to 11th over the course of a couple more restarts and some long green flag runs.
We didn’t let that discourage us. We kept working and fought our way back up into 6th, chasing down the cars running 4th and 5th, who were battling side by side just ahead of us. I tried sticking the nose under multiple times, looking for a way through, but in the end, we settled for 6th overall. Still a solid run considering how the day started.
A Real Building Block
This was a good night for us in a lot of ways. For the first time in three races, we’re finally able to tell what the car is doing again now that everything is back to normal. That might not sound like much, but after weeks of fighting a problem we couldn’t fully diagnose, it’s a huge relief.
We feel like we should have great progression over these next couple of races now that we’re past it. ✨
Thank You
Huge thanks to Petey Hinson and Tommy Sytsma for all the hard work this weekend. Nights like this don’t come together without people who show up and put in the effort behind the scenes, and we’re grateful for every bit of it.
As always, a huge thank you to all our sponsors. Everyone at Wings and Wheels Foundation, Balance of Nature, P1 Web Development Flo Racing, Drywater and Pitfit deserves a huge shoutout each and every week.
On to the next one. 🏁
