TACOMA, WA :: Last weekend was the “Summer Showdown” at Evergreen Speedway. My very first “big show” I’ve ever attended. We have quite a few big shows around here really. There’s the Fall Classic at Yakima Speedway, a 200 lap event that regularly sees 30 cars. There’s the Montana 200 at Montana Raceway Park that saw almost 40 cars this year. But this event promised to be something special, something for the ages. While I typically don’t attend these types of events, we felt like this was one you just didn’t want to miss. So we loaded up our car and headed to our NASCAR Hometrack for the weekend+; Les towing my racecar trailer and me towing my camper, which would become “basecamp”, in a borrowed truck since my truck was still broken.

We had a loaner engine in the car after ours let go a few weeks before. We also had a different transmission in the car that we picked up used the previous week. We had been running a 3-speed unit and the restarts were killing me. I either had to drop to 2nd gear and tach it out behind the pace car, or go to high gear and watch the field just drive away from me when the green flew. Neither is a good option in the biggest show of the year. So when we got this 2-speed unit (4-speed with only 3rd/4th) we put it straight in the car.  Ideally you’d have someone go through it and give it the once over, but we didn’t have time. In it goes, cross the fingers, take the spare with you.

Arriving at the track it would be just myself and one crew guy, Les, for Thursday practice. Our plan was to just use it as a shakedown session to make sure everything was working ok and nothing had any major leaks or stuff like that. With so many untested parts in the car, it was a solid game plan. As always, we’d gather some notes to help guide our setup decisions as well. The car was not horrid, but it wasn’t as good as it would need to be either. My pops always laughs at me because I give him feedback like that, “it’s not horrid” or “I could race it if I had to”. I’m probably not the best at explaining where we are, but he’s learning to interpret me. At least I can tell him what the car is doing, so that helps. Our notes from practice were that the car was tight through the middle and real tight off. But the good news was, nothing was leaking and everything was running well. So that’s something. Once we were done with practice I had to run that borrowed truck back to its owner. An hour and a half run each way, plus stop to eat along the way. I got back to basecamp at roughly 12:30 am.

Up early Friday morning, we’d get things started at about 9am. Grab a quick bite to eat and head to the pits once the gate opened at 10am. We knew we had some work to do to the car and wanted to get to it right away. Pops would be joining us today (we’d been texting and calling all day Thursday while he was at work) and he was at the race shop gathering up the last of the stuff we forgot to grab the day before. He would also be bringing another truck to tow the basecamp back home for me. I took some time to consult a couple fast guys on my setup woes and get some feedback from them. I’m happy that I’ve developed some friendships at Evergreen Speedway and that they are willing to lend some advice. The input would all be digested, discussed and aggregated before we made a choice to make a huge right rear spring change, going from a 175 to a 575. Go big or go home, right? Back out in practice, suddenly we had the car turning much better. Actually, it maybe was turning too good now, as it was a touch loose off. But we can tighten it back up a bit.

This would be an impound race, meaning our race tires would be purchased, mounted and then impounded. This is done to keep people from messing with tire softener or the like. We got our race tires back right before qualifying and were given a scuff session to knock the “new” off them. So we bolted them on and I went out in the scuff session. Some of the input we got from fellow racers was that we were starting our air pressures way too high, so this time we dropped them down some more. I’m not sure if I’m just not use to running on that low of air pressures or if the car was just that bad, but from the moment I set the car in the first turn I knew something wasn’t right. The car was so loose all the way through the turn that I could barely hold it. I told myself the tires just needed to come up to temp and I tried soldier on. Then it happened; on lap four, coming out of turn two, the car just stepped out on me and I couldn’t catch it. It went into a lazy spin like I’ve seen other guys do there. My mind was telling me “this never ends well for them” and I started having visions of my weekend ending right there. Coming off turn two at Evergreen is not a safe place to spin. More often than not, the spinning car will come on around and destroy the rear clip as it backs into the inside retaining wall and tire barriers. Luckily for me, my car turned a full 90 degrees from the racing line and then slid sideways and down into the only infield area that has a little grass patch, stopping short of hitting anything. Having had several rain showers pass through bot on Thursday and Friday morning, the grass patch was partly mud and sliding into it bent up the front valance pretty good and sprayed mud all up into the engine compartment. Outside of that, the car was ok. Throw it in reverse, back it back up onto the racing surface and head back to my pit with my head hung low and my tires less than happy with me. Pops joked with me on the radio “Well, we scrubbed that side of the tires, maybe we’ll scrub the rest later?” He always knows when I need a good joke.

Knowing that the car was way too loose, we had time to make some changes before qualifying. The scales showed that the new tires had been enough of a different size to take all the wedge out of the car, so that would explain what had happened. We threw some wedge at it and the car qualified ok, within 1/10th of a second of where it ran last time out. We shook out 47th out of 53 cars attempting to qualify. Not great in this field, but not bad considering everything else. This would place us 12th in Heat Race #3, we’d need 7 spots since only the top 6 would transfer in.

My heat Race turned out to be a serious A-Main lineup on any given night. With four guys in the top six that had won multiple championships, and a couple racing legends in there as well, I knew we were a long shot at best. Early in the run I tried to take it easy in case things got hectic. The leaders ran a serious pace, and as my race went on the car started getting tight off on me. I managed to lose the lead lap somewhere around lap 20 of this 25 lap Heat Race. I knew mid-way through that we were just looking to finish, as the car was just getting way too tight off. But it was good data to gather on the long run, at least we’d know what the car was doing over the course of a race. We’d head to Saturday looking for a miracle in the 50 lap LCQ (Last Chance Qualifier). For now, it was off to bed at roughly 11:30pm.

Up early again at 8am, we headed to breakfast at our local dive to grab a quick bite. I chose to actually eat something hearty this time because I have a habit of not eating breakfast on any given day and then on race days I tend to not eat throughout the day due to being hot. So this time I tried to plan ahead, fill up now and make it last longer. Back at the track for the gate opening at 10am again, we prepared the car for another practice session. This day my brother Tommy would join us to spot for me and my wife joined us in the pits as well, mostly for moral support. We had to start our LCQ on the same tires we had now qualified and raced our Heat Race on, which had been impounded again the night before. So back to our tires we practiced with Thursday and early Friday. They were the only four tires we had other than that race set we purchased Friday. Yes, you read that right, we showed up with only four tires, the four on the car. Those were the only four we had, period. We’re a little bit low-buck.

Saturday practice found the car to be tight again, since we were back to that set of tires. But we were afraid to change too much since our race tires were so much different than these. We made a few small changes to the camber settings to try and get more contact patch on the ground. We also made some changes to the shims in the bump stops to get the nose down on the ground more. After that we had to recheck the toe to make sure we hadn’t messed that up with the other changes, of course, it was off now too. We were looking for a lot of little things that might equal something more substantial without totally messing up those other tires. We would be rolling off 17th in an LCQ that the top 8 would move up. Again, the field was made up of former champions and legends of our area, so it was a pretty tall order. But this race can get a lot more hectic as guys start pushing and shoving for that final spot. So I planned on settling in and hoping for the best.

Once the race started, we managed to stack up about 3 cars on the first lap. I had come through turns 1 and 2 and settled into a gap on the low side. Coming into turn 3 my spotter was telling me “spinning car in 4, stay low, stay low.” So I breathed the throttle through 4 and started looking for a low line. As I rounded the corner and the wall moved out of my vision I saw that two cars had come together nose to nose and were blocking the entire racing surface, sliding down across the track to the bottom, where I had been aiming. Hard on the brakes, I got stopped just short of slamming into them. Getting into reverse, backing up and then rejoining the field it would be a complete restart with no laps completed, minus the two cars that had too much damage to go on. One of them would rejoin us in time to take the restart.

Now under green again I settled into another gap in the low line and started trying to race. There was this odd feeling to the pace though. I was running at the back of a pack of cars, maybe 8 of us, being led by the #10 car. You could just feel that the pace was being slowed by something and things were starting to get tense. Some of the guys just in front of me were really starting to get sketchy, the intensity was ratcheting up with each lap. My spotter and I talked about it too, you could just feel it coming. Then it happened. Heading into turn 1, the fastest part of the track, the #10 car suddenly went hard into the wall. Later he claimed he cut a tire on debris. Personally I think he got moved rather forcefully by one of those guys that was getting sketchy in that mob. I think we were all a little faster than him, some more so than others, and someone got tired of waiting. They’d go red on this one to clean it up.

Finally back under green one more time things got strung out a bit more than before. Guys started settling in and laying down laps. I found a spot and started working laps as well. At one point I got pretty racey with the #12 car before finally setting up a quality pass to get by that one. I then went to work on the #07. My car was better than his and at one point I was trying to time it coming off the turns and drove clear up under him to where his rear bumper lifted up a touch. At that point I figured I’d better ease off a bit and try again. Then, when I got to the next turn the car suddenly didn’t want to turn at all. It just went super tight on me in the matter of half a lap. Coming off four it took off on me so bad I thought I was going to knock the fence down. I tried to struggle through it for another lap before giving up every position I had gained, plus a few more in the span of that one lap. That was when I made the decision to just park the car, something wasn’t right and if I continued on like that we were going to end up in a wreck.

Once we got the car unloaded at the race shop we found that the three bolts that hold the steering rack had all come loose during the race. So instead of turning the steering wheel and having the wheels turn, it would simply move the rack back and forth. So I was turning the steering wheel, but the wheels were staying straight. Looking back, I’m glad I parked it. I know my guys wanted to try to finish, but in the end we still wouldn’t have made the Main Event and the payout was the same. It had been a long weekend with a short crew and I was done giving them extra work. In the end I’m very happy with the weekend I had. Sure, we didn’t make the Main Event. But I had a lot of fun and I’m glad I went. I think the rules were a little off as well. On a normal race weekend the crate motor cars (like mine) have to weigh 2700lbs while the compression cars (like Tommy’s) have to weigh 2900lbs, a 200lb difference. For some reason, this race they switched it to a 150lb difference, letting the compression cars run at 2850lbs. I don’t know if it was to keep from scaring off some of the big names from out of state or what, but the simple fact is, they made it way too hard for their own weekly racers to compete in this one. 50lbs may seem trivial, but we’ve spent a great deal of time tuning our rules to make it as even as possible every weekend, so why change it for the biggest race of the year? When we return to weekly racing in two weeks the rules will be back to the typical 200lb difference. So why is that 50lbs important enough for weekly racing, but not this race? My fear is, next year it may alienate the track’s own weekly racers and keep them home. Hopefully Evergreen Speedway goes back to the regular rules and gives their own weekly racers a fighting chance.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think this was the “must see” race of the year. We had a record number of cars attempt to qualify for this one. We saw amazing racing all weekend. And I’m looking forward to coming back next year. For those of you who missed this one, you need to mark it on the calendar for next year. This event ranked right up there with any other show in the Country. And the level of competition was clearly the best of the best. I think my NASCAR Hometrack proved that we have some great racing out here, we have some great talent out here and we can put on an amazing show!

As for me, I have to give the loaner engine back now. We’re looking for funding to get back to the track, so for the time being we are sidelined. If you’re interested in joining us as a marketing partner please don’t hesitate to give us a shout. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help your business out. We don’t just slap your name on the side of the car, we get out there and work to market you and your business. So if you’re looking to help out a hard working team, we’d love to welcome you on board!

Note: “Terrible” Tim McDougald is the driver of the #68 Mo-Dane Trucking / Clevenger Associates / Rev-Equip / Late Model Racer / Ringers Gloves Toyota Camry in the Whelen All-American Late Model series at Evergreen Speedway. When Tim is not driving the car, he helps the 3-car family owned team on the pit crew. Tim also handles the spotter duties for his brother, Tommy Rasmussen’s, #92 Mo-Dane Trucking / RPM Sales & Service / Vital Signs / Mauritsen Enterprises Chevy Impala racing in the Pacific Northwest. Tim is the HayWire Racing team’s web site editor and Media Relations Director handling all team pr, media obligations and sponsor relations. Tim is an avid blogger, active Twitter (@TerribleTim68) and Facebook user and a published author. For more information about the team, visit http://www.haywire-racing.com. For inquiries regarding marketing coaching and sponsor package help, contact Tim through the HayWire Racing website.