Friday Night 4-1-13

Again Friday night found us at Sunny South Raceway looking forward to another night of racing.  There was an extremely fast group of cars racing tonight.  In addition to the #44, #7, #32, #2r, Jeremy Lundy had his fast #53 there, also Billy Elmore, Jr. has a new car a beautiful green '34 Ford coupe #2,  Billy is an experienced Legend and Pro Challenge driver and has been very successful at SSR, expect him to be fast.  Additionally the #96, and #04 of Dawson Keener who won the most improved driver at SSR last season.  The #39 of Daniel Thompson was back, #33 of Dalton Chipley and the #94 of Brad West is back, he was involved in the crash with Connelly in the blue 32 last season and had extensive damage to repair. Also available was the #66 of Andrew Johnson.

We had taken a big swing at the handling of the car in preparation for this race and when Connelly got the car on the track he said it was handling perfectly--good news.  We qualified with a time of 13.035 which is very fast as the track was still green.  In the heat race Connelly and Jeremy Lundy put on a show  they ran nose to tail for the entire 10 laps with Connelly winning by a couple of car lengths.

Connelly threw a 4 with the big dice which gave us the 4th starting position outside second row.  We ran 4th for a good portion of the race, made a pass for third, got passed back.  Jeremy #53 spun right in fornt of us bringing out the caution with 2 laps to go.  We were now third with two to go, on the last lap Connelly got under Joseph #44 going into turn 3, they got together, Joseph spun, Connelly got into him and by the time he got off of Joseph two cars passed putting him back to 4th.  This all happened as the checkerd flag was being shown to the field.  Top finishers were #7 first, #94 second, #66 third, #32 fourth, #04 fifth.  All in all not a bad night we showed better than our finish, but it was a double points night and we didn't get hurt too bad on pointgs.  The damage to the car looks like no more than bent bumper tabs and a grill mount bracket, very fixable.  It doesn't appear  that any signifigant damage was done.  This season is setting up to be a very competitive one.  There are several cars and drivers that are capable of winning on any given night.  Looking forward to next race already.