October 5

October 5, 2000

Find the Gremlins!

Until you unload the racecar off the transporter at the track and take the first practice lap you'll never know how well it will perform.

The Lowes Motor Speedway car was rebuilt after the August Kentucky Speedway event. "On my first lap, it felt slower than rush hour traffic on I-4". Dan added, "I knew we would be looking for gremlins today."

Crew Chief, Larry Moore got his gremlins-bustin gear out. "We had a miss, so first we changed the carburetor. No improvement. We started changing electrical components. No better. We looked for gremlins in fuel lines and air chambers. They were well hidden." Qualifying time came and the team did not feel ready. We made the qualifying run at 33.123, our slowest run of the year. We were 3.2 seconds slower than the pole qualifying speed. This was a big obstacle for any driver to overcome in second round qualifying.

Next morning, we changed carburetors again. Larry beamed, "There's that little sucker!" A practice lap was run in the low 31's. More work. Next time out on the track a lap at 30.9. More tuning and we ran a practice lap of 30.7. That would have been good enough to make the show in first round, however, second day practice speeds were faster. In second round qualifying we ran 30.68 and just missed making the race by thousandths of a second. We were 35th fastest. Thirty-four cars make the race on qualifying speed.

Big Jim commented, "It's a big disappointment. Dan was running second in the Speedway Challenge program. The rules state you must compete in every speedway race to be in the program. We'll put this setback behind us and prepare for the Talladega race. we tested there last week and were fourth on the speed chart. Next week we hope to leave all the gremlins back in the shop and race for a top five or better finish."