Expectations

We made a big move before Michigan: we bought a motor. Because of that, our goals have shifted as a race team.

Now, we shouldn’t have bought it. It was expensive. It’s only good for four races. But we wanted to know. We HAD to know. We’ve been down on power all year with our SB2 engine program. We’ve been told it's as much as 25 to 40 horsepower on the top end. More on the low end of the RPM band. Even more on the torque scale.

So, how good could we be with a solid engine under the hood? At Michigan, we found out.

I was nervous before the weekend. It was a huge commitment by my father to get this motor for us. I wanted it to be worth it. If we had gone out in practice and wound up 24th again, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Luckily, we weren’t. We were 17th. The first thing Eagle and my dad asked me was, “Can you tell a difference?” The answer was yes. Oh my goodness yes. It was night and day.

We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, we weren’t unrealistic with our expectations. We didn’t think simply dropping a better motor in our truck would immediately put us to the front of the truck series field. There are a lot of top tier teams that we’re not going to be able to compete with from a resource standpoint. Our goal was to put ourselves solidly in that second tier of teams alongside Hattori Racing, Young Motorsports, Bolen Motorsports, NEMCO, AWS Racing, and Ricky Benton Racing. We think we did that.

That’s what’s been so frustrating about our year. I’ve spoken time and time again about what I think the potential of myself and our team is. But I’ve been unrealistic with what I thought we could achieve with our SB2 program. We were a third tier team while running SB2’s. We SHOULD'VE been competing with Premium Motorsports, MAKE Motorsports, Mittler Bros. Racing, Contreras Motorsports, and Bobby Dotter every week. With this new engine, the door is open for us to legitimately compete for top-10’s and top-15’s consistently. We think we’re a lot closer to a top-15 team than what we’ve been able to show so far this year. We proved that at Michigan.

Of course, we had some struggles, too.

We had a tire rub in practice that nearly ended our weekend before it got started. We cut a left rear tire down going into turn 3 at nearly 180 mph, but luckily I was able to gather it up and get it down to pit road without any damage. We dodged a bullet. We didn’t have a backup truck. A wreck would’ve sent us home.

We never got a chance to do a lot of drafting in practice because of the rub. When we did get around a few other trucks, we were competitive. We made some passes, and the truck handled okay in a pack. A little tight, but overall pretty good. I told Kevin I thought it was our best handling intermediate truck since Kansas earlier this year. 

I was optimistic for qualifying. I thought we’d be a top-15 truck on speed. That was ambitious. We wound up 20th. That bummed me out. We were essentially the on the tail end of the “fast” trucks. There’s usually a gap on the speed charts between the tiers of teams in our series, and we found ourselves right in the middle of that second tier. I wanted us to be a little closer towards the front of it. Maybe that’s too much to ask for the first race we ever ran with that motor. I just thought we’d pick up more than we did in qualifying trim. 

It wasn’t even our best 1.5 mile qualifying effort of the year. We were 19th at Kansas. Only 20th at Michigan. Yeah, we were a lot faster speed wise, but it didn't translate to much improvement on the charts. For us to not even post our best positional qualifying effort was pretty disheartening.

The race played out about as we expected. There were some really hard crashes and we managed to get around them cleanly. We ran inside the top-20 all day. But, I had a brake issue late in the race. I got on the brakes really hard to get around Spencer Gallagher's crash and was worried I might have warped a rotor. I could feel a hard vibration anytime I was on the brakes under caution.

It was decision time. We were running in the top-15, and pitting to check it out would cost us all of our track position. If it was something more serious though, it could wreck us and really put us in a horrible spot. Kevin and my dad deferred to me to make the decision. There was no chance I was coming down pit road.

I knew this was our chance at a top-10 finish; something neither myself nor my team have ever been able to have.

We were in a great position going into the final restart. I was sitting 12th, in the preferred outside lane. I felt good about our restarts all race. Our motor was getting up through the gears as well as any truck in the field. I focused in during the final caution. I was ready. I knew how critical getting a good jump was going to be for our chances to crack the top-10. As we came to the green, someone in my lane missed a shift. It might’ve been the #51 truck but I’m not totally sure. We were the first ones to get bottled up. Ben Kennedy had nowhere to go and smashed into the back of us, bending our bumper up under our fuel cell and damaging our right rear quarter panel. I got shuffled back and wound up only managing to finish 15th.

I was extremely disappointed. Who knows how many chances we’ll get at a finish like that. And for our truck to get damaged on the very last restart of the race…it just sucked.

I commiserated with Austin Wayne Self after the race, who also had some horrible luck during that last restart and fell from 8th back to mid-pack. We’re snakebit. I ran as good a race as I’ve ever run in my NASCAR career and we still didn’t get anything to show for it. Jordan Anderson finished right in front of us with an SB2. Travis Kvapil finished only three spots behind us. Tyler Young finished 10th. The same guys we compete with every week wound up around us in the final results, even when we were faster than them all weekend. I was disheartened. I mean why even buy that motor if we’re just going to finish roughly in the same place as usual and still get wrecked. What’s the point?

My dad had to calm me down. Finally, after some counseling, I was able to see the big picture. Yeah, we caught another tough break at the end of the race, but look at where we were. We were 12th with 8 to go and had a real shot to get a top-10. That’s something we’ve never had before. It might not have wound up the way we wanted, but we gave ourselves a chance. If we keep improving, that’s going to be a normal situation instead of an extraordinary one. 

I had my career best finish & tied the best ever for our organization. I shouldn’t be upset after something like that. But, I know we’re running out of chances to do something great this year. I just felt like I let a chance slip through my fingers. And by comparing us to some other teams, it made me feel even worse. I shouldn’t do that. I should worry about us. Martins Motorsports had a very solid day.

But, our expectations are even higher going into our race this weekend at Canada.

Some of you might not know, but I'm a driving instructor at Ron Fellows Performance Driving School at Spring Mountain right outside Las Vegas, NV. Most of the time, I’m working there between races. It’s the official driving school of Corvette Racing. It’s an awesome job. I work with some extremely talented racers. They’ve made me a much better driver during my two years out there, and I can’t thank all of them enough for how encouraging they’ve been through all of our struggles this season.

When the NASCAR guys want road course training, Spring Mountain is one of the places they go. The guys I work with every day have coached guys like Ty Dillon, Chase Elliott, Daniel Hemric, Ross Chastain, and several others. As far as I’m concerned, I’m representing all of us this weekend. I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself in that regard. I spent time this week studying the previous races. I spent hours on iRacing at another instructor’s house trying to learn as much as I possibly could about the track.

I’m expecting a lot out of myself.

So is our team. We knew we’d have a chance to get a solid finish at a road course with me behind the wheel, so we prepared a truck specifically for this weekend. Road course spindles, brakes, a new rear end, lease transmission – you name it, we’ve gotten our truck as prepared as we possibly could for Canadian Tire Motorsports Park. It's not the best truck in the field, we know that. All the top organizations build trucks from the ground up every year specifically for this race. We couldn't do that. But we did as much as we could.

We’re not up here to get a top-15. We’re up here to win the race.

It’s the first time I’ve ever shown up to a racetrack in NASCAR and thought I had a chance to win a race outside of Daytona or Talladega. Anything less than a great finish will be a disappointment.

Frustration

I was apprehensive at Bristol. If you read my last blog, you know why. 

We didn’t have great speed in practice – or so we thought. Our fastest time in second practice was a 15.60, only good enough for 30th place & nearly eight tenths of a second off the top of the leaderboard. But, when we looked at the best 10-lap average speeds (a better judge of race speed), we were 7th out of the 21 trucks that ran 10 consecutive laps. We never changed tires during practice. Our fastest laps came on 50-60 lap old tires. I allowed myself to be optimistic about qualifying.

We knew we’d have to run a great time in qualifying to make the race. The top-27 qualifying times in a NASCAR Truck Race are guaranteed into the field. The next 5 positions are given to the trucks with the most Owners Points that aren’t already in the field on time. If you’re in the top-27, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We weren’t in practice. We were worried. 

If it came down to points, our struggles this year haven’t given us many to fall back on. There are teams in front of us in points that we’re routinely faster than, but because of their cushion in points they’ve been able to cruise by, never worry about qualifying in on time, and take a provisional on most weeks. Or they’ve been able to rent out their guaranteed number to faster, better-funded teams to help pad their lead. Daytona crushed us. We finished dead last. Those guys had top-10 runs. It immediately put us 20-30 points down to our direct competition. They’ve taken advantage of that.

Whenever there’s a competitive field like there was at Bristol, those teams bring their worst truck, knowing they can take a provisional and force us to qualify in on speed or go home. During the race they’ll cruise around, disregard overall speed, and move up when other teams have problems. So, even when we finish ahead of them, it’s usually only by a few points. When we have an issue, even if they’ve pulled off track as a start & park, they’ll come out of the garage and do enough laps to pass us. I’m not mad at the guys on those teams for what they’re doing. They’re still working extremely hard to get their trucks ready every week. The owners are just playing the game.

It leaves us no margin for error. I made several errors in qualifying.

When I first headed out on track, there was a caution on my come out lap. That threw my timing off & heated up the truck. When I went back out, I completely overdrove it. Rather than just letting the tires & qualifying trim add speed, I tried to force it. I drove into the corners harder. I moved the wheel around a lot more. I pushed and pushed and when I didn’t hear the team call out a time on the radio after the 5th lap, I knew it had to be slow. On the cool down lap they told me we only ran 15.50, still 2 tenths off of the top-27. 

I tried to calm myself down in the truck. Just try to focus on the next run & getting a good, clean lap in. Kevin asked me what we needed to make the truck a little faster. I thought it was a little tight at the end of our first run. We raised the track bar and loosened it up. That was the wrong call. I got a better lap in, 15.43, but then the truck got way too lose. I was sideways on both ends. With the clock winding down, we were still out of the race & helpless to go any faster. The #63 team of MB Motorsports was in our same situation. They had run a 15.36 but someone nipped them by .03 seconds and pushed them back to 28th place. They ran as many laps as they could, but wound up 1 spot short. 

Mike Mittler, the #63 owner, and my father have become close over the course of this year. MB Motorsports is only 1 spot behind us in Owners Points. My heart broke for them. We’ve been on their side of things several times. Even though they out-qualified us, they went home and we got to race. I didn’t feel like we deserved it. I let the team down. It was my job to put our truck in the top-27 and I didn’t get it done. We should’ve been on the trailer and it was my fault. We only made the race by dumb luck.

The race started late, and we were very loose in the early laps. I fell a lap down. We got a caution because of rain and I came down pit road so we could tighten it up. On the restart, I knew I was battling with four other trucks for the lucky dog spot. I got a great jump. I was able to clear a few of them, and get up to the back bumper of the #16 truck of Stewart Friesen before the caution came back out on lap 40. The next restart was the same thing: a dogfight. I ran side by side on the outside with Austin Wayne Self battling for the lucky dog spot for about 6 or 7 laps. I was finally able to clear him, and the caution came out a few laps later. I was pumped. Our truck was starting to show the long run speed we had in practice. It was time to start moving forward.

We got another good restart, and tucked in behind the #92 of Parker Kligerman. Friesen ran wide and Parker got under him in Turn 3. When I tried to follow, Stewart chopped down on me in Turn 1, and we made some slight contact. My spotter Toby Whealdon said his spotter apologized. It was an accident. Stewart didn’t mean to come down on me. I told Toby to tell him it was no big deal. 

Stewart ran really wide into Turn 1 a few laps later. I gave him a chance to gather it up, and got a run on the inside on the way out of Turn 2. I had my nose to the inside of his rear quarter panel down the backstretch. As we entered Turn 3, he chopped down again, this time making much harder contact. I tried to stay off of him, and dropped down onto the apron to avoid more contact. When it started to slide, I hammered the throttle and did what amounted to a 360 with a ton of tire smoke, but was able to keep the truck off the wall & rolling in 2nd gear.

I was furious. I wouldn’t have been as mad if he hadn’t gotten on the radio and told me sorry for doing the same thing a few laps earlier. When we headed down pit road, our truck was smoking. It was hard to turn. I figured it was from RF damage during the accident, but it turned out to be coming from under the hood. Our power steering pump had a leak. The fluid was getting onto the headers, causing more and more smoke. NASCAR told us to send it to the garage, effectively taking us out of the race.

We went back on track with no power steering, but I’ll admit I couldn’t drive it. If I had the whole racetrack to work with, then maybe I could. But with the traffic at a track like Bristol, there was no chance. I could barely turn the wheel. I had both arms up on the right side of the wheel trying to crank on it as much as I could, but we kept coming dangerously close to swerving in front of lead lap cars. Plus, we were under minimum speed. We pulled off and finished 31st.

For the 6th time this year in 12 races, Tommy Joe Martins scored a DNF. I’ve only finished on the lead lap twice (Pocono & Gateway). We’ve got the stats of a start & park team, but we’re trying as hard as we possibly can. I’m doing everything I can do inside the truck. But through all of that effort, we still don’t have much to show for it.

I’ve had plenty of people on twitter and other forms of social media tell me how bad a racecar driver I am. Maybe they've got a point. I’m known more from this blog than I am from my results on the racetrack. That bothers me. I’ve complained too much this year. I don’t want to come across as a guy that rants and raves every week. Believe me, I’d love to be able to write about how great our year has been. But it hasn’t been great. It’s been really damn bad. But still, rather than focusing on the circumstances I’ve found myself in, I should start focusing on what I could’ve done to change them.

It would be very easy to say that we’ve had some bad luck this season. We absolutely have. Running over debris in Kentucky was bad luck. But I’m tired of blaming every bit of adversity we’ve had this year on bad luck. Luck plays a part in everything. All you can do if you want to get better is worry about the things you can control. I haven’t controlled my part of the job very well this year. And as a team we’ve made mistakes in preparation & maintenance that have resulted in parts failures and bad finishes. 

We all have to do a better job, and it starts with the decision making of the guy driving the thing.

The middle of the pack is a bad place to be in a NASCAR truck race. Generally, the guys up front are good drivers in good trucks. The back is made up of people in poor equipment, whether they’re talented or not. But, the middle has a weird, wild dynamic. You have good drivers in good cars that are struggling, and mad they’re having a mediocre day. You have average drivers in great equipment.  You have great drivers in average equipment that are forced to overdrive to keep up. You have inexperienced drivers on one race, give it everything you’ve got, try to make a name for yourself type of deals. 

It’s a dangerous mix. 

Unfortunately we’re stuck in the middle every single week. So, I need to do a better job of recognizing trouble & not put our truck in dangerous situations. Racing is racing, sure. Stuff happens. But I shouldn't have tried to pass Stewart when I did. That was a bad decision. Yeah, he pinched me, but I didn’t have to go for that spot. It was still early. I could’ve waited. 

When I got dumped at Iowa, that was my fault for not getting past a couple of trucks that held us up and allowed the #02 truck to get to our bumper. At Atlanta I felt a vibration but didn’t immediately bring it down pit road. Eventually we corded a right front tire. I’ve made several mistakes with adjustments this year that got our setup going in the wrong direction.

Like I said earlier, as a small team with no points cushion we don't have ANY margin for error. I’ve made my fair share of errors this year, and it’s cost us. I’m sure I’ll make more. But I’m going to try to limit them as much as I can. I want to be able to climb out of that truck every week knowing I did the best job I could possibly have done for us. Right now, I don’t feel like I have. 

I can do better. That’s what upsets me the most. I’m frustrated with myself.

We’ve made a big change for Michigan. It wasn’t a smart financial decision for our race team, but we’re hoping it gives us a better chance to compete for solid finishes. We hope it allows us to showcase our team to potential sponsors and the rest of the garage. I hope it gives me a better chance to show what kind of racecar driver I can be.

I just hope I'm a good one.