With top ten finishes the last two races, things are starting to come together for our project car.
The most recent race for our asphalt Project Car was at the famed Hickory Motor Speedway. This was a race that I was looking forward to for quite sometime. The track is only 30 miles from us and I consider it to be our home track.
The thing with Hickory is you have to work on your car to create forward bite. So for most of practice on Saturday we spent our time practicing on old tires and trying to lay down consistent lap times. The track surface is so old there that you can't worry about where you are on the practice sheets. You just have to focus on getting the car to drive good and keep from spinning the tires up off the corner. We were extremely happy where we were at after practice.
But then qualifying came. There is something going on with our new chassis, every time we slap on brand new rubber it locks the car down into the track and slows down a tenth. Same thing happened this past weekend. We could barely qualify 18th. We knew we had our work cut out for us because a tenth and a half would of put us 6th. It was clear that track position was going to be crucial.
The green flag dropped and the car developed a loose condition getting into the corner. This costs us a few spots right off the bat as I was trying to gather her back up. I wound some front brake back into the car, and we picked off a few cars but we still didn't have the forward bite we needed to be able to keep up with the leaders. We were about a tenth or so off.
We came in around lap 100 and took our tires and made a few small adjustments. The car came to life again. We restarted close to 20th because of a small run in on pit road, where another car actually drove over our left front fender. We drove back up through the field and missed a couple of cautions and restarted 11th with 50 to go. We ran out of laps and ended up finishing 8th. I felt like we had just outside a top 5 car. The guys upfront had a little bit fresher rubber then us, and we had just a tad to much right rear spring in the car and the car was just a hair to loose over the course of the longer runs. But all in all the car/team is making huge improvements.
From here we go to South Boston on August 8th. The next thing that we need to work on is our qualifying trim. Our setup the last two weekends have been extremely good in race trim. It's just that our qualifying laps haven't been up to par. So we've had to use pit strategy to gain track position back. In the next week or so we hope to go testing and try some things for qualifying trim.