So...not really a particularly great weekend for the Chase Motorsports team.
I knew it was going to be a rough race for us the moment we started the car to warm up the motor and drive train. We jacked up the car so the rear wheels could freewheel in turn warming up all the fluids in the tranny. As the car was running one of our crew yelled at me from the drivers seat. "We got a problem". He pointed out an oil leak. I removed the spare and found a fitting that was leaking from one of the joints. Just as we found this the first car went by. OH $H*T! No time to replace it. (good thing we drew 16th off the line) At this time Pops and my brother-in-law are getting in and straping down. I'm on top of the car rerouting lines to by pass that cooler. DONE and off Pops goes to the line. He pulls in with 2 cars to spare. Talk about cutting it close! He comes through looking clean and off on his first lap. As he goes around we are getting updates from our outlining pits. Things are looking good. He comes around in an 1hr12min 70 mile lap wich is just under 60mph average and in 8th place. We are looking GOOD. His glasses are falling off so he pulls in to fix them and head out after a 20 second pit. We get an update from pit 1 which is at mile 14 that the car looks great. Perfect. So we figure we should be getting an update from pit 2 in about 20 to 30 minutes, they are at mile 42. Quite a bit of time goes by so I radio 2 to see if they have seen them. They have not
. No sooner that I radioed pit 2 another car in our group 1248 radioed main saying that 195 was on it's lid. After I hear this my heart sank. I'm pissed off so I start throwing stuff. (pops did this the first race in the car too, thats why i'm pissed) How can he do this? Roll twice in a season? Anyway after review of the car and of the in-car cameras it wasn't his fault. It happened to be a mechanical failure in the right rear causing that wheel to lock up putting him into a spin at over 100mph. When the tires bit all he could do was hold on. He went over 4-6 times. Car is ok but we'll have to replace a couple tubes.
Here are some pics. When I get the incar edited I'll post it and on youtube.
Another fun fact. I looked at the GPS when they got back to camp and the top speed was 116.
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