Community Racing Challenge

Before we even get started, major props go out to Joey Rodgers on the best racing night of his career

Joey Rodgers in his #69 HotJackets.com Dodge Neon celebrating his first heat race win at Owosso Speedway

to date. He had maybe his worse weekend the weekend previous, so this was a great bounce back. He won his heat, finished 3rd in the feature and took over the points lead in our division !! Congrats young man, may this lead to bigger and better things for you !!

For Team CRC, this was one of those weekends where on the scorecard it didn't look like we had any success, but if you are aware of the background stories, there was some good things which happen.

The week didn't start out good at all, on Thursday we did the head gasket job on the #8 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Dodge Neon. Against my better judgement, I didn't hook the exhaust up first and listen to the motor to see if there was any damage. Not wanting to waste anytime, I just went ahead and pulled the head and did the head gasket job. Cool thing was that Cam and I basically completed the head gasket job in about 3 hours. That's pretty good time. We also fabricated a new exhaust and muffler, got rid of the header and went with a stock manifold. We started at 6:00pm and at 10:00pm we were ready to fire it up. It was quiet, real quiet. So quiet that you could hear the Rod Knocking like a church bell on Christmas Morning. Yup... So we are going to order a replacement rod for the other motor (which already has the head pulled) and fix that and do a motor swap this week (again). Randy touched up a couple of minor things on his car and Cam got the firewall fully installed on his car.

Friday morning there were black clouds everywhere.. figuratively and literally. School called at 8:30am, Cameron had been involved in an incident and was getting suspended for 3 days for fighting. I'm not a big fan of fighting (you can read more about that here : http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1183227087&v=wall&story_fbid=124039670953892) so needless to day, Cam was black flagged for the night. I can't confirm this, but I think Cam went up into his room and did some kind of ancient Navajo tribal dance because what was a nice day got ugly fast. Pretty soon, it looked like rain and not long after that it was rain. Everywhere. I posted the rain outs as they came in and I think every single track which runs on Friday in MI, IN & OH rained out on Friday.

Following Rob's lead, we decided to throw in the towel on racing and just spend some time at home. We had a good dinner with the wife and just kind of enjoyed the evening.

Saturday we headed up to the shop around Noon... didn't have a lot to do to the cars, we installed the new shifter on the #99 Cat's Part Mart Ford Focus and put it on the trailer.. then realized we forgot to fix the serpentine belt. We had the belt and tensioner, so it wasn't a hard job, just kind of miffed at myself for forgetting about in on WED/THU.

I called Matt Vannier and offered him one of my cars for the night. Matt had a bad accident last week at Owosso and his car was broke beyond repair. They had a backup car in process and they attempted to accelerate the build, but didn't get it done so I didn't want Matt to lose the points lead over that so I offered him up his choice of the #8 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Dodge Neon, #13 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Ford Taurus SHO or #99 Cat's Parts Mart Ford Focus. He declined. I see that the Boogie Man raced Springport on Saturday also.. I have a hunch that Matt and Bill are probably quiting Owosso. That's too bad.

At 3:00pm we pulled out of Okemos Auto Service and headed to the track. I asked Cam and Randy as we jumped in the truck if we needed to stop at the gas station and both said no. (note - this is called foreshadowing in the literary world) When we got the track, we performed like a well oiled machine, Randy put the 1.22's in at the track, while I returned to the shop to get the 3rd car (note to self, finish other trailer so we can pull 3 cars). Big extra special thanks to Bruce Fickeyes for letting me borrow his truck to get the dolly and other car, saving us major time in unhooking the F-350 from the big trailer.

It was really quite warm and the track was a little bit greasy.. everyone's qualifying times were down in our class, while Randy's time in his #57 Okemos Auto Repair Dodge Neon stayed the same from last week. I told him that meant he went faster even though on the stop watch it was the same. He just missed the fast heat and was the 9th fast qualifier out of 19 cars at 20.754. Cam had a hard time finding 2nd gear in the #00 O'Neils Auto Repair Dodge Neon and went real slow with a 24.243. The #99 Cat's Part Mart Ford Focus still seems down on power (good news on that later in this report) and while we shaved three-tenths off last weeks time, this week going 21.238, we were still the 7th slowest car.

Cam started on the pole in the slow heat.. we shared some instructions after qualifying on how to tell if you were in 2nd gear. He must have listened because he took off like he was shot out of cannon and left the rest of the slow heat in the dust. While I"m sure he was having a blast for 3 laps jumping out to a half lap lead, the black flag waved as he came around for lap 4.. nearly 3 seconds under his qualifying time (your only allowed 0.25) and his heat was over. I struggled badly, car didn't want to run, I couldn't find the gears I wanted (new shifter) and finished dead last.

Randy was in the 2nd heat and ran a very controlled race. Car showed some speed but nothing compared to the missle in the high groove being run by Joey Rodgers. (Read more about Joey's night at the JPM Blog : http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=450189811240) Randy brought it home fourth, but optimistic about what he had under him for the feature.

I know Jeff, Pam, Rick & Jen had carnage night scheduled for April 17th and it got cancelled, but a bunch of folks in the Sport Stock division must have been suffering flashbacks as we had wreck filled feature. Unfortunately we were part of that. On Lap 2, the RF spindle broke at the strut and Randy and his #57 Okemos Auto Repair Dodge Neon made a hard right turn coming out of four. Hard right hand turns suck ! He took a pretty hard lick (in fact, frayed his seat belts !) and was done for the night. Randy's 7th DNF this season (out of 10 races). Randy wouldn't be alone in the DNF department this night. On the 3rd lap of the race, Danny Chapman, Amber Slagel and Kevin Marlow got together and all 3 touched the wall and all 3 were done for the night. On Lap 6 Russ Cords made hard contact with the wall and his night ended. On Lap 8 Brian Beckner locked up the brakes and made nose first contact with the wall. On Lap 14 Jim Cronk got into a mess and his night ended. Long story short.. 19 cars started the feature and only 10 finished it.

This was a good news/bad news thing... the good news is my Focus would only run decent for about 3 to 4 laps at a time. Every time we'd go green, the car was okay for 3 to 4 laps before the motor would go flat. If I could turn the car off and back on, it'd revive itself. All these cautions game me time to do just that. the bad news is we ran a lot of extra laps. I don't know what the official count was, but our 20 lap feature must have seen at least 40 or 50 laps. That's a lot of laps for a 4 gallon fuel cell. Especially one which didn't get filled up before the nights action started and wasn't checked before the feature (remember that foreshadowing thing above ?!) On Lap 12, the caution came out because the #00 O'Neils Auto Repair Dodge Neon slowed and stopped on the front stretch. Yup, Cam ran out of gas.

Official results coming out of Saturday - Randy picked up a DNF and an 18th place finish. Cam picked up a DNF and a 12th place finish. Patrick picked up a 6th place finish. I'm not going to talk about the winner of the race because I feel that was a joke. Props to Russ Potter for being the fastest legal car. In the standings, I'm now 3rd; Randy is 8th and Cam is 22nd. Cam is 7th in the ROTY standings.

Craig Frase of Fried Chicken Motorsports

Sunday we headed down to Mottville Speedway. Mottville is a different kind of track. Very rustic and has an old school charm to it. Small crowds and low car counts its a fun place to race. Merle Holden, the promoter there, once again put on a fun, no drama show. Thanks to Charlie Cotton for helping us identify and repair a problem on both our cars (#99 & #00). We found a corupted fuel supply line which was most likely causing the fuel starvation issue on the #99. Car had WAY more power in teh feature after making that repair. We also found we had some bad plugs in the #00. It will also be faster this week. It was great to meet the legendary Charlie Cotton and also to meet the man behind Fried Chicken Motorsports - Craig Frase. Craig has the baddest, fastest VW Rabbits you've ever seen.. yes, I said VW Rabbits, you gotta see them to believe it. Kevin Whitmer put a hurting on us in the feature, Kevin, sorry we brought the knife to the gun fight. HOWEVER -- next week with $260 bucks on the line, we'll be packing heat ! Hopefully a few other big game hunters wil give Michiana's best kept short track secret a try.

I also need to send congrats out to our extended teammate JT Leach for winning the Oliver's Collision Pony Stock Feature at Springport Motor Speedway. JT drives the #96 out of the O'Neils Auto Stable and picked up his 2nd feature win of the season. Dennis had a very respectable 3rd place finish after winning the 60 lapper race last week. Steve Wrenn finished 6th and the guys are now 1st, 3rd & 5th in the standings there. SWEEEEEET !! With Maurice stating "It appears as though there simply isn't enough interest in this race track any longer. I just don't understand. I think it's time I take a "wait and see" as well. I've never been so frustrated and disappointed as I was last night. We cannot keep going with only 21 cars in the pits and 154 people in the stands. I've worked hard to provide a nice place to race, yet very few want to come. ((http://forum.springportmotorspeedway.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=70) I hope these guys come to Owosso if that happens, they are good racers and would be an asset to the track.

Once again.. I want to thank the sponsors that make all this possible for us.. Cat's Parts Mart of Lansing, Okemos Auto Service of Okemos, O'Neils Auto Repair of Eaton Rapids, Jet's Pizza of Owosso Speedway, Renegade Racing Fuel/Miles Petroleum of Merrill, and YOUR NAME COULD BE HERE !! WE HAVE SPONSORS SPOTS LEFT ON ALL OUR CARS AND PRIMARY SPONSORSHIPS ON TWO CARS.

Before we even get started, major props go out to Joey Rodgers on the best racing night of his career

Joey Rodgers in his #69 HotJackets.com Dodge Neon celebrating his first heat race win at Owosso Speedway

to date. He had maybe his worse weekend the weekend previous, so this was a great bounce back. He won his heat, finished 3rd in the feature and took over the points lead in our division !! Congrats young man, may this lead to bigger and better things for you !!

For Team CRC, this was one of those weekends where on the scorecard it didn't look like we had any success, but if you are aware of the background stories, there was some good things which happen.

The week didn't start out good at all, on Thursday we did the head gasket job on the #8 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Dodge Neon. Against my better judgement, I didn't hook the exhaust up first and listen to the motor to see if there was any damage. Not wanting to waste anytime, I just went ahead and pulled the head and did the head gasket job. Cool thing was that Cam and I basically completed the head gasket job in about 3 hours. That's pretty good time. We also fabricated a new exhaust and muffler, got rid of the header and went with a stock manifold. We started at 6:00pm and at 10:00pm we were ready to fire it up. It was quiet, real quiet. So quiet that you could hear the Rod Knocking like a church bell on Christmas Morning. Yup... So we are going to order a replacement rod for the other motor (which already has the head pulled) and fix that and do a motor swap this week (again). Randy touched up a couple of minor things on his car and Cam got the firewall fully installed on his car.

Friday morning there were black clouds everywhere.. figuratively and literally. School called at 8:30am, Cameron had been involved in an incident and was getting suspended for 3 days for fighting. I'm not a big fan of fighting (you can read more about that here : http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1183227087&v=wall&story_fbid=124039670953892) so needless to day, Cam was black flagged for the night. I can't confirm this, but I think Cam went up into his room and did some kind of ancient Navajo tribal dance because what was a nice day got ugly fast. Pretty soon, it looked like rain and not long after that it was rain. Everywhere. I posted the rain outs as they came in and I think every single track which runs on Friday in MI, IN & OH rained out on Friday.

Following Rob's lead, we decided to throw in the towel on racing and just spend some time at home. We had a good dinner with the wife and just kind of enjoyed the evening.

Saturday we headed up to the shop around Noon... didn't have a lot to do to the cars, we installed the new shifter on the #99 Cat's Part Mart Ford Focus and put it on the trailer.. then realized we forgot to fix the serpentine belt. We had the belt and tensioner, so it wasn't a hard job, just kind of miffed at myself for forgetting about in on WED/THU.

I called Matt Vannier and offered him one of my cars for the night. Matt had a bad accident last week at Owosso and his car was broke beyond repair. They had a backup car in process and they attempted to accelerate the build, but didn't get it done so I didn't want Matt to lose the points lead over that so I offered him up his choice of the #8 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Dodge Neon, #13 Your Sponsor Name Could Be Here Ford Taurus SHO or #99 Cat's Parts Mart Ford Focus. He declined. I see that the Boogie Man raced Springport on Saturday also.. I have a hunch that Matt and Bill are probably quiting Owosso. That's too bad.

At 3:00pm we pulled out of Okemos Auto Service and headed to the track. I asked Cam and Randy as we jumped in the truck if we needed to stop at the gas station and both said no. (note - this is called foreshadowing in the literary world) When we got the track, we performed like a well oiled machine, Randy put the 1.22's in at the track, while I returned to the shop to get the 3rd car (note to self, finish other trailer so we can pull 3 cars). Big extra special thanks to Bruce Fickeyes for letting me borrow his truck to get the dolly and other car, saving us major time in unhooking the F-350 from the big trailer.

It was really quite warm and the track was a little bit greasy.. everyone's qualifying times were down in our class, while Randy's time in his #57 Okemos Auto Repair Dodge Neon stayed the same from last week. I told him that meant he went faster even though on the stop watch it was the same. He just missed the fast heat and was the 9th fast qualifier out of 19 cars at 20.754. Cam had a hard time finding 2nd gear in the #00 O'Neils Auto Repair Dodge Neon and went real slow with a 24.243. The #99 Cat's Part Mart Ford Focus still seems down on power (good news on that later in this report) and while we shaved three-tenths off last weeks time, this week going 21.238, we were still the 7th slowest car.

Cam started on the pole in the slow heat.. we shared some instructions after qualifying on how to tell if you were in 2nd gear. He must have listened because he took off like he was shot out of cannon and left the rest of the slow heat in the dust. While I"m sure he was having a blast for 3 laps jumping out to a half lap lead, the black flag waved as he came around for lap 4.. nearly 3 seconds under his qualifying time (your only allowed 0.25) and his heat was over. I struggled badly, car didn't want to run, I couldn't find the gears I wanted (new shifter) and finished dead last.

Randy was in the 2nd heat and ran a very controlled race. Car showed some speed but nothing compared to the missle in the high groove being run by Joey Rodgers. (Read more about Joey's night at the JPM Blog : http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=450189811240) Randy brought it home fourth, but optimistic about what he had under him for the feature.

I know Jeff, Pam, Rick & Jen had carnage night scheduled for April 17th and it got cancelled, but a bunch of folks in the Sport Stock division must have been suffering flashbacks as we had wreck filled feature. Unfortunately we were part of that. On Lap 2, the RF spindle broke at the strut and Randy and his #57 Okemos Auto Repair Dodge Neon made a hard right turn coming out of four. Hard right hand turns suck ! He took a pretty hard lick (in fact, frayed his seat belts !) and was done for the night. Randy's 7th DNF this season (out of 10 races). Randy wouldn't be alone in the DNF department this night. On the 3rd lap of the race, Danny Chapman, Amber Slagel and Kevin Marlow got together and all 3 touched the wall and all 3 were done for the night. On Lap 6 Russ Cords made hard contact with the wall and his night ended. On Lap 8 Brian Beckner locked up the brakes and made nose first contact with the wall. On Lap 14 Jim Cronk got into a mess and his night ended. Long story short.. 19 cars started the feature and only 10 finished it.

This was a good news/bad news thing... the good news is my Focus would only run decent for about 3 to 4 laps at a time. Every time we'd go green, the car was okay for 3 to 4 laps before the motor would go flat. If I could turn the car off and back on, it'd revive itself. All these cautions game me time to do just that. the bad news is we ran a lot of extra laps. I don't know what the official count was, but our 20 lap feature must have seen at least 40 or 50 laps. That's a lot of laps for a 4 gallon fuel cell. Especially one which didn't get filled up before the nights action started and wasn't checked before the feature (remember that foreshadowing thing above ?!) On Lap 12, the caution came out because the #00 O'Neils Auto Repair Dodge Neon slowed and stopped on the front stretch. Yup, Cam ran out of gas.

Official results coming out of Saturday - Randy picked up a DNF and an 18th place finish. Cam picked up a DNF and a 12th place finish. Patrick picked up a 6th place finish. I'm not going to talk about the winner of the race because I feel that was a joke. Props to Russ Potter for being the fastest legal car. In the standings, I'm now 3rd; Randy is 8th and Cam is 22nd. Cam is 7th in the ROTY standings.

Craig Frase of Fried Chicken Motorsports

Sunday we headed down to Mottville Speedway. Mottville is a different kind of track. Very rustic and has an old school charm to it. Small crowds and low car counts its a fun place to race. Merle Holden, the promoter there, once again put on a fun, no drama show. Thanks to Charlie Cotton for helping us identify and repair a problem on both our cars (#99 & #00). We found a corupted fuel supply line which was most likely causing the fuel starvation issue on the #99. Car had WAY more power in teh feature after making that repair. We also found we had some bad plugs in the #00. It will also be faster this week. It was great to meet the legendary Charlie Cotton and also to meet the man behind Fried Chicken Motorsports - Craig Frase. Craig has the baddest, fastest VW Rabbits you've ever seen.. yes, I said VW Rabbits, you gotta see them to believe it. Kevin Whitmer put a hurting on us in the feature, Kevin, sorry we brought the knife to the gun fight. HOWEVER -- next week with $260 bucks on the line, we'll be packing heat ! Hopefully a few other big game hunters wil give Michiana's best kept short track secret a try.

I also need to send congrats out to our extended teammate JT Leach for winning the Oliver's Collision Pony Stock Feature at Springport Motor Speedway. JT drives the #96 out of the O'Neils Auto Stable and picked up his 2nd feature win of the season. Dennis had a very respectable 3rd place finish after winning the 60 lapper race last week. Steve Wrenn finished 6th and the guys are now 1st, 3rd & 5th in the standings there. SWEEEEEET !! With Maurice stating "It appears as though there simply isn't enough interest in this race track any longer. I just don't understand. I think it's time I take a "wait and see" as well. I've never been so frustrated and disappointed as I was last night. We cannot keep going with only 21 cars in the pits and 154 people in the stands. I've worked hard to provide a nice place to race, yet very few want to come. ((http://forum.springportmotorspeedway.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=70) I hope these guys come to Owosso if that happens, they are good racers and would be an asset to the track.

Once again.. I want to thank the sponsors that make all this possible for us.. Cat's Parts Mart of Lansing, Okemos Auto Service of Okemos, O'Neils Auto Repair of Eaton Rapids, Jet's Pizza of Owosso Speedway, Renegade Racing Fuel/Miles Petroleum of Merrill, and YOUR NAME COULD BE HERE !! WE HAVE SPONSORS SPOTS LEFT ON ALL OUR CARS AND PRIMARY SPONSORSHIPS ON TWO CARS.