Spotter Bytes
SPOTTER BYTES
By Wayne “Muffy” Wildermuth
Pretty slow week this week with less travel and less tracks to visit for me. This week’s only traveling was to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway (NHMS) for the 35 lap All-Star Shootout on Friday and the Andy Blacksmith 100 presented by Donate Life New England on Saturday. We got there on Thursday to go through technical inspection to prepare for Friday’s 35 lap All-Star Shootout. Then we had some time off for the rest of the night. I took advantage of that and went shopping for a new pair of shoes. The ones I brought with me were worn out and not enough cushioning for my feet for 3 days of being on them. Danny Fusaro (Justin Bonsignore’s spotter) even asked me about them, so I guess I picked out some pretty cool kicks.
On Friday, we had a pretty good car for the shootout, but we needed to keep in mind that we needed the car for the 100 lap race on Saturday, so we played it a little conservative (yes TC can be conservative) so we didn’t tear up the car. The shootout was divided up into two segments; a 20 lap race and then a 15 lap race with a 5 minute pit stop under yellow between the two segments for the entire field. We started 13th and finished 6th out of 20 cars in the shootout and still had a good car for Saturday’s 100 lap event.
Saturday was qualifying and race day. We were the 23rd (I think) car to attempt qualifying out of 34 cars. We ended up qualifying in the 4th spot. Not too bad. So then it was race time. The race consisted of 100 laps with a planned yellow flag pit stop for the entire field around the halfway point in the race. We started 4th and took the lead a few laps into the event, but if you are familiar with NHMS, you know it is tough to keep for very long, so we swapped the lead back and forth with a few drivers. The car was as good and as fast or better then anyone else out there at that point. The car started to fade a smidge though by the halfway break, which was on lap 52 I think. We went down pit road for our pit stop and the crew made some adjustments to the car. All cars were brought back out onto the track in the same order they were running when the yellow came out. That put us 7th in the lineup. We were now ready to go to the finish with what I thought would be the best car on the track. We had a driver with 4 previous wins, a ton of knowledge and a car with a ton of speed, I was ready.
On the restart everything went bad fast for us. Someone ahead of us got sideways and the entire field started to scatter. (#8 driver Donnie Lia said in a later interview that Doug Coby in the #2 spun his tires on 
the start and that he (Lia) who was being pushed from behind lifted the #2 off the ground and that’s when he (Coby) got sideways.) I told Ted to “check up” and I’m sure he saw it and was already on the brakes. We almost had it cleared, but in that mess we got hit and spun into the inside wall. The damage to the nose, right front and rear was enough to sideline us for the remainder of the event. We ended up with a 31st place finish. We will never know how we would have finished, but I know we would have been fighting for the win. We will be back to NHMS in September to have another go at it. The Whelen Modified Tour next heads to Monadnock Speedway for the O’Reilly Auto Parts 200 on July 25th.