Race Recap: 6/17 - Hickory Motor Speedway

Right at halfway through the season, we came into Saturday’s race day feeling motivated and ready to continue the chase for a victory in the 2023 Limited Late Model season at Hickory Motor Speedway. It was by no means a bad outing, but we still came up just a little shy.

During morning practice the car felt really good and very fast and we knew the suspension work we had done during the week was paying off. We made a few minor adjustments to our setup and the car improved even more all before practice one.

In the first practice we had changed to our race tires and things didn’t quite feel as good on the track. Fortunately at this point in the year we have gotten pretty good at adapting to our tires and we were able to pick up a bunch of speed by the second practice.

In qualifying we were able to secure P4, but our electrical gremlins from the previous few weeks returned and we were down on speed at the top end compared to our competition. After qualifying we experienced some terrible deja vu and were back to work trying to locate the source of the electrical problem. One theory we came up with was that the motor getting hot could be playing a role. The other theory was that we had a bad ignition switch; a problem we had fixed the week before and seemed to yield some decent results. Either way, the ignition switch was really the only thing we could control so we made the change and hoped for the best.

The feature race was largely uneventful outside some exciting moments on track battling for 3rd. We went green to checkered again which has become tradition for the 35 lappers. At the drop of the green I could tell I didn't have any forward bite as if the locker springs in the rear-end had gone bad. I was able to challenge for 3rd for the first 20 laps but ultimately had to settle in and take a 4th place finish. 

Even though we lost a bit of ground in the points chase, we still came home with a solid finish and the car in one piece.

We have a two week break before our next race on July 8th, which will give us some much needed time to get back to work on maintenance on the car!

Thank you for supporting grassroots racing and we will see you at the track!