April 15th, 2012 - Rockford Speedway Recap

It's always fun to get out and start the year at the Spring Classic in Rockford, IL. Every year they have a practice on Saturday, and then the race on Sunday. This off season we built a brand new chassis, so we were pretty excited to test it out. We went into Saturday's practice thinking we would just shake it down, and make sure there were no issues with the new chassis. As the day went on, we kept on getting a little better, and a little better. At the end of the day, we felt that we could be a player on Sunday.

Sunday morning came, and we wondered if we were even going to get the race in. It had stormed pretty bad the night before, and a good chance of storms again on Sunday. As always though, the staff at Rockford Speedway works very hard to get the races in because they know how far all of us travel to get there. We practiced again three sessions, and the car felt good again. We went into qualifying feeling pretty good, and qualified tied for 6th fastest with Bill Prietzel, out of 27 cars.

In the heat race we started in 8th place, and before too long have moved up into 4th. After tracking down the top 3, we ran out of laps and finished in 4th position. Moving into the feature, we started in 3rd behind Tom McClintock. At Rockford Speedway, the outer groove is by far the preferred line around the track. With the feature being 50 laps, we were hoping to work up to the outside lane because it came be a long race at Rockford trying to hold the inside line for that long.

We fought hard behind McClintock but the cars in the outer groove were moving up faster than the inside line in front of us. So we settled back and ended up moving up into the outer groove but we dropped back into 9th place before we got to the outside groove. With about 15 laps down, the first and only caution of the race came out. This year Mid-Am went to a cone style restart, in which everyone gets lane choice to form a double file restart. This early in the race, and with how good the cars were on the outside lane, we decided to take it to the high side. We restarted in 10th position.

On the restart we were hoping the same would hold true as the original green flag start. We were hoping the outside lane would hold strong, and we could move into the top 5. The inside lane jumped the start a bit, and the result of that trickled back through the field. We ended up giving up a couple spots to the inside lane, but then passed a few cars before the final checkered flag fell for the weekend. Our final finishing position was 7th place.

Overall we couldn't be happier with the debut of our new chassis at Rockford Speedway. Finishing the race there can sometimes be a test, so to come away with a top 10 is a good start to the season. We move on to Golden Sands Speedway in Plover, WI on Memorial Day weekend. We've never been there before but some of our fellow competitors from Elko Speedway have had good success there, so we're hoping to adapt to it as well as they have. After such a long break, we're going to be very excited to get back racing.