10/15/02
Okay, where do we start? Only one car this year, so the trip through inspection was pretty uneventful. Turns out our rear bumper was about 1/2 inch too long. Not too difficult to fix. We finished up the day turning some fairly quick laps in practice. Wednesday started out okay. I registered with the mods to get some more track time, so we were out early. Things went well for the first couple of sets, but all of a sudden the car picked up a serious vibration. We spent the rest of the day chasing it, and never found it. We changed the water pump, transmission, drive shaft, front hub, rear rotors, and rebalanced the wheels. Nothing worked. Took time with the mods on a very quick track and ended up at the very end of the field, 2 seconds off of Brett's time of 29 seconds. The weather held for the next day, and most of us thought the track would be even faster. Unfortunately there were two wicked slick spots, one coming off of 2 and the other going into 3. I never quite got those parts figured out and didn't end up as quick as I would have liked. We timed again with the mods, this time only 1 1/2 seconds off of quick time for the day. When I times with the 358's we were 24th fastest, 1.2 seconds off the pole. I just wasn't aggressive enough through the slick stuff. The good news is that we were one of the top 8 times that didn't have a guaranteed spot which turned out to be pretty important. At this point I pretty much gave up on the vibration, it was either in the rear or in the motor. The next day was very wet. We finally got on the track 2 or 3 hours late. The car was decent in warmups and we got ready to go out for the mod heat. As I sat in line I could hear a pretty loud noise coming from the engine. I pulled back into the pits and found that we broke a rocker arm. I was going to slam a set of rockers on, but realized that the lifter was messed up too. We started pulling the motor but there just wasn't enough time to get the other motor in and still make the 358 heat. So now we would be starting the race in 43rd. Saturday was wet as well. We were okay in warmups which was nice since we had completely changed the setup on the car from the day before. And to make a long story short, we had a pretty decent race. I passed a bunch of cars and stayed pretty much out of trouble and finished 21st, and ended up with the hard charger award for my efforts. I can't thank Jimmy, John and Todd enough for all their help for the week, they worked their butts off.