September 1st Race Report

(Week from Hell #2) Preparations for this race began with trying to decide if the motor failure on 8-25 was the end of the ’05 race season---or possibly the end of my involvement as an owner- driver.
I just wasn’t sure if my heart was in it anymore. The racing budget had been stretched too far already.
I knew I could count on Jimmy and Jon’s help if I continued. Mike and Shannon had offered to work with me under my special needs at the time.
Kim then helped me realize that the quest to reach victory lane was still a very important part of what makes me tick. Quitting at a low point would have let a bad feeling linger.

I decided to keep plugging on with this challenging season.

Mike Pettit found a block to work with. I made 4 trips to New Milford, enjoying the daily hikes in gas prices. Time pressure forced us to prep a new block only this week and temporarily use a set of street prepared head castings.
I returned Wednesday evening about 9:30 to Jimmy and Ron Smith ready and waiting to install the new engine. We had it running about 1am.

We used warm ups as our engine break in time and changed the oil following warm ups. With so much to do, and under hood checks to complete, we didn’t check our car at the scales for the first time all season. We then finished second in our heat.

This is when everything went downhill quick! DQ’ed for being 6 lbs under weight. It turns out that the track had changed their scales and that they read 10 lbs lighter than the old scales, AND our new engine was 15 lbs lighter than our old engine. We added 25 lbs of lead to our car to get back to our normal readings. We had never suspected our new engine would weigh any different from the old engine, and of course no announcement had been made that the scales had been changed. We had to start last (32nd).
The feature had no cautions, and we were not running real well. 14th place finish, and I was pretty upset. Our efforts went unrewarded.

The following results are all UNOFFICIAL
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