Tom Fearn Ends Winless Drought at Stafford with Former Championship Winning Chassis
Stafford Springs, CT — For Late Model driver Tom Fearn, his feature victory last Friday at Stafford was his first win since the 2009 season. In ending his winless drought, Fearn took a bit of an unorthodox route. While normally newer chassis cars are the way to go, Fearn actually went backwards and picked up an older Late Model car prior to the 2012 season. With top-6 finishes in each of the first four races of the 2012 Late Model season, the move is paying dividends for Fearn and the #92 SAFCO Foam team.
“This car is actually the car that Jim Peterson won the championship with three years ago,” said Fearn. “Joe Hamm ended up selling the car to John Morgillo and we bought it from him. John’s son only drove the car a couple of times in two years, so it hasn’t been on the track that much. We had a new car and we struggled with that car for 2 seasons. No matter what we tried to do, we couldn’t get the car to work, so we decided to take a different avenue. We sold our car as a rolling chassis and we bought the car from the Morgillo’s. We have the same stuff in this Hamm chassis that we had in our previous car, RA.D. Automachine is doing our engines, and my father does the transmission, he has been doing my transmissions for 25 years, so we’re going in the same direction that we had before, just with a different chassis. It’s been satisfying to realize that what we had was capable of running up front.”
While Fearn’s equipment has been working well in the older car, another factor in Fearn’s success this season has been hooking up with his chassis specialist Jay Moore from JMR Chassis.
“We took the car over to Jay Moore at JMR chassis, he put a setup in the car, and we unloaded for the first practice and we were very fast,” said Fearn. “Jay has been a big help to us, every week he helps us a little on the car, he makes a few adjustments and the car seems to be getting better and better and faster. Jay helped me a few years ago with my Late Model and we kind of ended up going our separate ways. Now we’ve kind of come back together and we seem to complement each other well with the ideas we have for the car.”
While Fearn is currently the Late Model points leader, he knows that he has to stay on top of his game as he is the car that everyone is hunting after.
“We have to keep up what we’ve been doing, I think we’ve been faster each week and we need to keep that going and have everybody chasing us,” said Fearn. “We need to keep working on the car to make it go faster because our competitors are doing the same thing on their cars. I guess you could say we’re setting the bar and everybody else is trying to get there. We have a couple of things to try this week on the car to make it even a little better and we’ll see how things go. I think we have a good baseline to work off of.”
In addition to Jay Moore’s help with the chassis, Fearn has several other key members of his team to be thankful for.
“I have to thank my wife Sue, she is a big part of the team and she spots for me,” said Fearn. “I also have to thank my cousin Stu, he has stepped up his involvement this year with the team and taken on some extra responsibility with the team, which takes some of the burden off of me. We just got King Ward Coach Lines back on board with us last Friday, but Stu has been instrumental in sponsorship with SAFCO Foam to keep us going this year.”
For more information, contact the Stafford Motor Speedway track office at 860-684-2783 or visit us on the web at www.staffordspeedway.com.
Sources: Scott Running/Stafford Motor Speedway PR