May 30 - June 1

On our way to the 9^th race of the season in Topeka Kansas, we stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma to do a little testing in our Kendall Oil Dodge Stratus. Even though Clyde still hasn’t been cleared to travel with us yet, we still needed to stop and break in some tires and Clutch discs. The weather forecast for Topeka is supposed to be hot and humid and Tulsa proved to be an ideal stop because it was that way for our test session. Some of you wonder why there is so much fuss over the weather in our ‘Bits’, and the reason for that is that it is an extremely important factor in how we set up the car. This weekend proved to be a very good example of that. Topeka, at almost 1,000 feet is one of the higher altitude tracks we run at and we start out handicapped because of that plus the expected warmer humid weather.

Friday we started out with 90 degree humid weather and completely missed the set up to end up 19^th for the session. The 2^nd run we adjusted the car a little better and ended up 10^th for the day which was much better than the first run. Saturday morning we woke to some cooler conditions with the sun going in and out of the clouds. The weather confused us all by its fickle behavior, causing us to change the transmission and rear end gears 3 times before the first qualifying session Saturday. We weren’t the only ones as we looked around and saw most teams were doing the same thing. Well, thanks to a sharp crew under the guidance of Tom Martino, we guessed pretty good as our run was 6^th best of the session and moved us up to that spot for the weekend. The 4^th session was just too hot and even though we ran well, it wasn’t good enough to improve our spot.

Sunday morning we woke up to clear and hot conditions again. The first warm race of the year reminds us of the upcoming summer racing season. We prepared our Kendall Dodge Stratus for a good long day with the usual fresh Kendall oil and went out first round to face Jason Line. Jason didn’t qualify well here but has been much better this year on reaction times and certainly is one of the top runners. We had a really good light, .011 to his .032 and needed most of it because we spun pretty hard off the line. Second round we tried to calm the car down a little as the conditions were getting hotter and slicker. This second round was pretty bad as only about half of the cars made a decent run. We were a little hot out of the gate and our opponent, Kurt Johnson, shook, spun, and had to shut off but it still netted him a win as we left a little too quick and turned on the red bulb. Shucks and darn as the guys really worked hard in the changing weather conditions to keep us in a winning form. Not all bad as by our calculations we moved up a spot in the points to the 5^th position and we keep our competition in check. It was unfortunate because we had a good shot of winning this one. Well, it’s only a few days as the guys head for Chicago where we will contest the 10^th race of the season in just a few days.