LEE, N.H. — Nothing says the beginning of Autumn more than a trip to New England to run with the Northeastern Midget Ass’n.
It was a beautiful Saturday at Lee USA Speedway and I raced midgets and NEMA Lites for Todd Bertrand Racing.
It’s the first track where I have previously raced on the NEMA schedule and that is crazy to consider. My first race at Lee USA was last year and that was also my first time in a NEMA midget.
Since then, I’ve made tremendous strides as a driver. It was also my second time with Todd Bertrand’s NEMA Lite, so I wasn’t going to experience anything new on the track or the car.
During my first practice for NEMA Lite, I had my fastest lap of the day on my fourth lap at Lee USA. Only one other driver beat my lap the entire day and that was eventual NEMA Lite feature winner Joey Bailey, who ran a 14.158-second lap.
The fact that I was up to speed so fast already in the Lite made me feel pretty good about our chances heading into the night’s heat and feature. In the NEMA midget, we mimicked our run plan in the Lite car, going out in first practice to scuff our new tires for the feature and turning my fastest lap on lap four at 13.26 seconds.
That was again the second fastest lap of the day out of all the NEMA midgets.
That seemed to bode well for the heat race and feature, as long as we could keep nailing our setups for both cars.
In the second practice for each car, we put on my old feature tires from Star Speedway, so that we could get a few more laps in each car without wearing out our newly scuffed feature tires. I went fifth fastest in the NEMA Lite but actually went fastest in practice two in the NEMA midget. Predictably, we went slower in both cars given the tire degradation.
During this we also got an opportunity to see how the track might have changed and to see what kinds of setup adjustments may make the cars better going into the heats and features. Both cars felt pretty loose in practice two, so we planned on taking that under consideration heading into the heats with the same tires.
The eight-lap NEMA Lites heat was first and because I was the fastest car in practice, I had to start last in heat three.
I had a good start to the race, passing two cars in turns one and two. By the end of the first lap I was solidly in fourth, but I would struggle to move forward any further because of the looseness of the car combined with the worn tires.
I completed the second lap and as I was turning into turn one, my steering wheel came off. I immediately got on the brakes hard and thought about trying to put the wheel back on, but before I could do anything, I hit the outside wall and the car tipped over onto its side.
I just chilled in the car until the safety crew got the car right side up, and then hopped out. The impact didn’t hurt me in any way, but the car was definitely done for the night.
The only thing that was a little hurt was my pride, but I was also just really perplexed as to how the steering wheel was perfectly fine for two long laps of scuffing and for two flying laps afterward.
The point where the steering wheel fully locks is very close to the beginning of the steering column — a very short distance where the steering wheel can be on and functional without being fully locked in. A little pressure toward me on the wheel, and the wheel just comes off, and a little pressure away from me and the wheel fully locks in.
That I went so long in the in-between stage without the wheel either locking in or coming off strains my credulity to a high degree. I’m convinced that even if I tried to, I wouldn’t be able to repeat what happened there.
Nonetheless, another lesson learned and I will ensure that I never repeat that rookie mistake again.
I started second out of six cars in the field for my midget heat. It was a straightforward race as I was able to hold my position throughout the race but was unable to pass the car in front of me. The worn tires we were using for the heat didn’t help me, but I finished second nonetheless, setting me up well for the feature.
We tightened the car from practice to the heat and were planning on tightening it even more. This turned out to be a good decision because the car ended up being really loose in the feature.
I started the race fifth but pretty quickly fell back to seventh over the course of the first five or so laps. I did my best to move forward with the car and to try and drive around the car’s limitations in the first few laps, but my experimentation and the small mistakes that I made in doing so were capitalized on by the competition behind me.
Once I realized that I couldn’t drive around the problem I stopped experimenting and decided to settle in and not overdrive the car and drive within the car’s limits.
I was able to hold my seventh-place position throughout the rest of the race but just couldn’t move forward.
Near the end of the race, I was slowly starting to close down to the guys in front of me because of my superior tire management. But at that point it was too little too late and the race was already over. The spread from the winner to me crossing the finish line ended up only being 2.3 seconds, one of the closest fields in NEMA midget racing that I’ve seen in a while.
I had the third fastest lap time of the race, which was surprising, but everyone’s fastest times were separated only by two tenths from fastest to 10th fastest. I was able to gain a lot of valuable experience and learn some important lessons — check your steering wheel — at Lee USA running the NEMA and NEMA Lite.
I also got a pretty big boost of confidence in myself as well as in the Bertrand equipment that I ran. This driver-car combination is a very fast, potentially winning combo once we are able to put it all together.
I really can’t wait until I go winged midget racing again. These cars provide a robustly competitive and intense short track experience that is very hard to match anywhere else, while also being of course exceedingly enjoyable from a driver’s perspective.