4/24/04
Seems like it's been a long time... We got a very late start this year, ordered a new car from Bobby back in January and got it at the beginning of March. We got it finished just in time for warm-ups. Funny how if you have one week to get it done you can do it, but it takes 4 weeks if you have 4 weeks. :) We went out to warm-ups and ran only 2 sets, the car was really good. We took the next couple of weeks to take care of a few teething pains and rolled out the 'Valley for the first race.
Of course there was a little controversy right off the bat. We had some tires on the car that were completely legal by the rules, yet the track deemed them illegal during the drivers meeting. Not really sure how that works, I'm still waiting for an answer. So we pulled those tires off the car before the heat race and put it all behind us. I started 3rd in the heat and after telling Jimmy how patient I was going to be, promptly made it 3 wide going down the backstretch and into 3. Got my quarter panel roughed up for my efforts there. We came out of that 2nd and went into the lead on the next lap. We finished there and decided to make no changes to the car. Then it was hurry up and wait. The Mod feature was a caution fest, looks like they were trying to make the Sportsman feature look good. Just before the feature we decided to make one significant change to the chassis. I rolled off 5th in the feature and when the first caution came out on lap 1 I was in second. I grabbed the lead on the restart and never looked back. We had a bushel full of cautions during the race, but each time I was able to maintain some advantage over the guys behind me. After all the disappointments last year it was awesome to pick off a win on opening night. But we weren't done yet. We went through tech and they wanted to confiscate my right rear tire. Turns out, unknown to me, Jimmy had removed the tire size from the sidewall, and the track thought I had used an unapproved tire to win. So did I. I didn't find out until my guys told me about 30 minutes later. So for the 30 minutes or so of my own discomfort, it was totally worth it to pull one over on everyone. Got to love that!