The first night of the 2012 racing season was finally here last Saturday.  After rebuilding the car over the winter, it was great to get to the track and see how much the work helped make us faster. 

The first practice went really well and we turned times in the 19.0’s.  This was faster than at any point last year so that was very encouraging.  We tried a few adjustments and didn’t get any faster so in the end, we just stayed put to see if cooler weather in the evening would help the car.  We are qualifying at CNS this year so we really hoped to do well and have a good starting spot in the heat races.  The car seemed very loose during qualifying so I didn’t expect a great time but it turned out that we qualified 5^th out of 26 cars.  A very good result.  After talking to other drivers, the track conditions had changed and almost everyone was loose during qualifying.

The qualifying race went well and we ran in 6^th place for most of the heat race until Chris Eggleston spun in turn 4 on the last lap.  That allowed us to finish 5^th.  This was out of the fastest cars from qualifying so again, I was happy with the result.

CNS now does a random lineup for the top 10 qualifying cars to keep the racing interesting during the main events.  After this draw, we ended up starting 8^th (outside of row 4).  The car was not fast on the outside so I got shuffled back to 11^th pretty quickly.  Pretty similar to nationals so I was really just thinking I needed to start picking off one car a time.  At about that time, there was a call on the radio for a red flag.  Kevin Kurtz and Ryan Jones made contract came out of turn 2 and Kevin ended up flipping end over end at least two times.  There was a long delay but everyone ended up being OK.  The race started again, traffic spread out pretty quickly and I started trying to pass the first car, #3 Wayne Barlock.  I was able to get underneath Wayne several times but he was fast in the outside lane.  We race like that for more than 15 laps before I was able to make that pass.  From here, I worked on one more car but was not able to pass the 77 at the finish line.  The first week was an 8^th place finish.  Not as good as I hoped, especially after qualifying 8^th but in the end, there was no damage to the car so we can just work on making it faster. 

Our next race is on May 5^th.  Hopefully we will see you at the track.