This is the first year that we have planned on going to the Legends Nationals.  It is in Las Vegas, NV this year so it is close enough to not be a crazy drive and we are more competitive than we have ever been so, it seemed like a good year to set that goal.  The first step to making that happen is to win a national qualifier race.  This means I needed to be the highest finishing Master in the main even to qualify.  There were two chances this weekend to do that.  First in Pueblo, CO at I-25 Speedway on Saturday and then in Erie, CO at Colorado National Speedway.

We went to Pueblo with essentially the same setup as the last time we were there and finished third.  This turned out to be a bad setup for that day.  The car reacted to the track completely different than the last time we were there.  It had an extremely bad push.  Probably the worst we have had in this car.  We tried several things to free the car up including different rear springs, cross weight changes and even adding rear-stear into the car.  We did qualify for the trophy dash.  Finally for the dash, it was freed up but, then it was very loose and we finished fifth out of six.  At least that gave us something to work with.  We tightened it up for the main and felt pretty good about the set up.  They inverted the start of the main so we started in the back of the main.  I needed to finished ahead of several other drivers and one of those was starting on the pole for the main.  That meant I needed to go through the field of 15 cars to pass him.  I didn’t make it though.  I passed 9 cars and finished sixth but Mike, the other driver, finished fourth and took the first national qualifying spot of the weekend. 

I was a little worried about not qualifying at this point.  There would be more cars at CNS and there are some really fast cars at that track.  Because we had done so many things to the car to get it to run at Pueblo, we needed to get the car back to a good setup starting point before getting to CNS.  We got back from Pueblo around midnight and unloaded everything back into the garage.  I stayed up until after 2am getting the car torn down and then my Dad came over about 7:30am to work on the setup.  We did a complete setup and it took a total of almost 5 hours.  This made it a pretty long weekend.  We felt pretty good about getting to CNS after that though.

We went out for the first practice at CNS and the car was extremely loose.  We really didn’t expect that from the setup so we were back to thrashing on the car.  This time though, we were able to get the car close with just cross weight and tire pressure changes.  We felt pretty good about going into the heat race because the car was back to being stable and we drew a number that had us starting on the pole.  We lead a couple of laps and ended up finishing third.  Because of way they invert the start of the main event, we also ended up starting the main on the pole.  We ran in the top five for quite awhile and was the top runner in the master class.  About then, Jon Krizman starting really gaining on us.  He has been the fastest Masters driver in the Legends for quite awhile.  I figured I was in trouble at this point but with 4 laps left, he ended up spinning and hitting the wall coming out of turn 2.  After this, we ended up winning the masters division and qualifying for Nationals.  We will get a trophy for qualifying later this year and we are also leading the Colorado Masters points.  This would put us in a bonus race called the Race of Champions during the nationals weekend.  The year is going well so far.  Now we just have to stay consistent.

We will be at CNS again this weekend so it will be an easier setup week.  Hopefully we will see you all at the track soon.