Here is a recap of race #3 - April 30th:

Practice: We always practice on used tires, usually the race tires from the previous week. The thinking behind this is, if we can get the car good on old tires, the car will be great on new tires. We had a minor push just before the middle of the turns, but the car was great getting into and off of the corners. We made some small tweaks to both the car and the driving style to get the car better.



Qualifying: Evergreen Speedway has adopted a “European” qualifying format to all classes this year. Instead of each car going out for 2 laps, one at a time, they send out a few cars, together, and run about 8 laps, with the fastest lap being the qualifying time. This week was the first time we have tried this in the Super Late Model division, as rain wiped out qualifying for the opener, two weeks ago. With 10 SLM cars there on Saturday, they splint the field in two and sent out 5 cars at a time. This proved to be too many cars on the track at the same time, as many drivers complained of not getting any “clean” laps as they were running up against slower cars. You could put us in the group of complainers…we qualified 5th.



Heat Race: They split the field in half for 2 heat races, the bottom 5 qualifiers in the first heat, and the top qualifiers in the second heat. That put us in the back of the second heat. So we started 5th and moved up to 3rd at the finish.



Main: We started 4th, outside second row. At the drop of the green, the inside lane was the one to be in as the outside lane failed to move. We got boxed in and dropped back to 7th place by the time the inside row had freight-trained by. A caution flew about 10 laps into the race and that helped bunch us up to the front runners. After the green flag came back out, we were able to move our way up to second place just as another caution flag flew. As the green flag flew again, I went down into turn one, hit the brakes and felt the pedal go to the floor. 18 laps to go and no brakes. We hung on for a 4th place finish. Happy for a good finish. A little frustrated because we knew it could have been better. After the race, we took a look at the car and it became obvious that we ran over something heavy that was lifted off the track by our right-front tire, hit the exhaust and continued back ripping out the brake line on the right-rear.



Here is a video of the main event from Dan Moore’s car, now with 2 cameras:
 

And here is a video from a friend in the grandstands.