Andy's Angle: Pocono Report

Andy's Angle: Pocono Report

 

We traveled last week to our home state of Pennsylvania for the event at
Pocono. The mountain weather is always suspect and this weekend would be
no different. Heavy fog, lots of rain and intense heat and humidity. A
great weekend for a stock car race!

The rookie drivers and their cars that we worked with were unloaded and
rolled through the technical inspection. This is of course always a
pandora's box of sorts. You never know what new inspection official guy
is getting broken into racing on what area of the car, and it turns out
that these cars that have raced again and again seem to develop these
mysterious new things wrong with them while they ride in the trailers to
and from races. Frankly, I think they get a big charge out of making
life miserable for racer's. 

For the most part, 99% of the officials have never worked on a race car,
pulled an all nighter getting them ready or towing them to a track, so
they haven't got a clue of what it means when they want some of the
ridiculous things they request. It is a cycle that is aggravating to
most of the competitors. But you can't argue, it is pointless. 

Practice went okay for the number one car, running plenty fast enough to
qualify around the top twenty somewhere. Driver Ed Pompa making his
first ever attempt, got a little loose getting into turn one after
hitting the rumble strips. The result was a turn one crash, backing hard
into the concrete retaining wall. The soft walls helped cushion the blow
to the driver, but the car was pretty used up.

Once it was towed back to the garage area we assessed the damage. Most
folks would have loaded up and headed for the house. But alas, those of
us addicted to racing and having no back up car, we elected to try
fixing it.

What happened next was nothing short of a miracle. The crew from the 22
car came over, all of them, a couple of crew from the 11 car and all the
guys from the number 1 car. We cut the rear section of the frame off,
cut the back section of the body off and went to work. By dumb luck,
racers Brian Kern and Magee Miller were hanging with us. Magee had a new
tail clip (rear frame section) at his shop in Allentown. Off he went!
Bobby Gerhardt loaned us headers, Jeff McClure and Eddie Sharp loaned us
parts, it was a phenomenal act of kindness and hard work.

We got it done almost in time. The rain bought us an extra hour or so.
We changed lower control arms, upper ball joints, trailing arms,
transmission, driveshaft, springs, control arm bushings, fuel cell can,
I can't even remember all the parts. 

At the end of the day, a group of racer's pulled off the impossible and
we got to see the car run around Pocono Raceway all day and soldier on
to a twenty fifth place finish. Not a bad day for a rookie driver in his
first attempt, and a great day for a hard working group of race car
guys.

Never say never. Sometimes it can be done against all odds.

 

Bill Catania

www.bensur.com