BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — My busy schedule took me back to California last week, where I raced a modified and a pro late model at Kern County Raceway.
Overall, it was a very good weekend. It started with a practice day on Friday, with seat time being the order of the day. That helped me get comfortable with the race track and, even more importantly, it gave us valuable track time to test the cars and fine-tune our setups.
At that point I’d only run one race in the SPEARS Pro Late Model Series, which was on Irwindale Speedway’s third-mile configuration. We last ran the modified at Irwindale on the half-mile and we had pretty good pace, so we felt pretty good with the setup.
It was more of a struggle with the pro late model as we attempted to find the right balance for the car that would enable me to drive the car deeper into the corner.
We made some awesome adjustments to the modified that helped us qualify third. In the pro late model, we definitely were leaps and bounds better compared to where we started, but we still had a long way to go in terms of setup and driver comfort. We qualified 17th, so we started deep in the pack.
I started eighth in the 50-lap modified race after I drew an eight in the random pill draw for the top-eight qualifiers. I moved up to sixth at the start, but while trying to settle into a rhythm and not overdrive the car, I got passed and dropped to seventh.
There were a few cautions during the race and the first one caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the lineup just before the restart that almost put me on the outside in eighth when I should have been on the inside in seventh.
That ultimately didn’t matter because I got passed for seventh and the caution came right back out, so I restarted on the outside in eighth. That ended up being a good thing because my restarts on the outside were better than on the inside.
I regained seventh and had the best battle I’ve ever had on an oval. I was dicing it up with Sam Jacks, racing side-by-side for several laps as neither of us gave an inch.
I’ve been working on my assertiveness and aggressiveness in these big-bodied cars, where rubbing is indeed racing and if you’re not leaning on people with the car then you’re going to get walked over and bullied.
That happened in my first few races in the modified and when I raced with the Carolina Pro Late Model Series. The world of open-wheel racing is very different, so it took some getting used to.
We raced hard and, after a few rubs here and there, I got the position away from Jacks. Unfortunately, he retaliated not by racing, but by spinning me out in turn one and sending us both to the back of the field.
Luckily, I started on the outside again and drove away from Jacks comfortably, passing a few cars along the way to finish seventh. It was a good race despite getting dumped halfway through.
The pro late model race was next and we started next-to-last after our poor qualifying effort. The goal was to run a clean race, make no big mistakes and see what the car had. We ended up 13th after starting 17th.
The car got more comfortable as the race went on and I have a feeling we’ll be more competitive in the pro late model once we get the looseness dialed out of the car.