5-15-10 ASA Sportsman at DRP
Dells Raceway Park 40
I did not know what to expect on Saturday at DRP but I knew it was going to be an experience. First, it was going to be the first night race that I have had in a long time. The vast majority of races at Slinger in the past have been during the daytime because the Thunderstock feature has always gone fairly early in the show. I needed to change the visor on my helmet otherwise it would have been too dark to see. I also could not help but notice how much faster the race speeds seemed to be at night rather than during the day.
During the course of the days events we qualified 9th out of 18 cars. I was a little disappointed in the time and knew that we were faster than the lap I turned. But on a flat third mile track where passing is extremely difficult anything can happen.
During the course of the 40-lap race I remember telling myself, “Man I haven’t had this much fun in a racecar in a long time.” I was cruising around in the 4th place position getting pressured from behind by the number 6 of Jason Tohma. We were having a great battle as I clinged to the 4th place position while he tried to work his way around the outside and occasionally tried to dig under my car on the inside. I did my best to hug the inside groove knowing that passing around the outside was extremely difficult at the dells. With 15 laps to left in the 40 lap feature I was approaching a lap car on the outside of the track meanwhile Jason Tohma snuck to the inside of me. I decided to use the lap car as a blocker so I could retain my 4th place position. Jason thought he had my car cleared on the front stretch so he moved up the track to shoot the gap between. I saw him moving up the track and in anticipation of a collision I moved down about a 2ft. to prevent myself from being pushed into the wall. When our cars collided Jason’s car wrapped around the front of mine causing him to take the wall head on. The thing that made the wreck even worse is that our cars hooked bumpers and dragged each scraping the front stretch wall. I feel awful about the accident and in retrospect I wish I just would have let Jason have the spot. We both would have finished higher than we did and we would have escaped with no damage. But we both were playing a game of chicken where we expected the other to blink. Instead we both ended up with tore up race cars.
Lucky for me our car was not tore up nearly as bad as Jason’s and we were able to finish the 40 lap feature with a 9th place finish.
I really enjoyed racing at Dells this week and we look to make major improvement within the next few weeks because our next race is going to be the progressively banked half-mile track of Hawkeye Downs in Iowa. We plan on making some significant geometry adjustments to the car that we have never done before. Hopefully this will allow us to hold a higher corner speed and turn some faster lap times.
Aaron Cain #5
