Spotter Bytes
SPOTTER BITES
By Wayne “Muffy” Wildermuth
The day was Wednesday and it was time to go to work, no, not the 9:00 – 5:00 job, the job of getting the Whelen Modified Tour car to the front at Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park. Well, things went pretty well for the #13 Teddy Christopher car, well, for the most part. We qualified 10th for the show and that was ok with us. Everything was going ok until we hit the pits for a quick pitstop and Teddy drove right by the pit stall. That’s what he gets for listening to the spotter lol. I w
as counting him down to the stall and (telling him when to pull into the stall) I said “right there in front of Preece”. The problem was, it was the #16 and Preece is no longer in that car, its Timmy Solomito. Yes, I goofed. I never say names when counting drivers down into the pits, but for some reason I did. I caused Ted to miss the stall. Well, we had to back up and we lost some time in doing so, but we came out of the pits about the same spot we went in. The guys pulled off a great stop, but we were not able to gain any spots because of overshooting the stall. Then on our way out of the pits, we ran over a jack. It was not even our jack, but NASCAR called us for a penalty and made us come in for a stop and go. After all that, Teddy drove hard and we managed to get back to the 10th spot where we finished the race. I think we had a 10th place car and that’s all we could get out of it. The car was in one piece and we took that as a good thing. Riverhead Raceway is the next event for the Whelen Modified Tour and we hope to do well there.
On Saturday, I took a 4 hour trip from Rockland Maine to Manadnock Speedway for the 2nd leg in the Tri-Track Series with the #31 (yes #31) of Steve Masse. A trip to that track is usually only 2 1/2 hours from home. It was much longer from Maine. Well the heat race was great, we started 3rd and we won it. We knew that would put us starting on the outside pole position, but not so fast, there is a redraw for the top 10 starters. So what did Steve draw? Yeah, you guessed it #10. So we had our work cut out for us. We ran conservatively for most of the race. We kept getting stuck on the outside for the restarts and that was fine, but the cars in front of us were blocking our progress out there and we kept falling further back. We finally started making headway and started moving forward. We were up to about 7th when the #6 got passed and we went to his inside and he cut across our nose hitting our right front. We had to back out of the throttle or we would have wrecked. As a result, we fell back to about 12th or so. We worked our way back to 7th again with only 7 laps to go. We moved even closer and got to 3rd with 3 to go. There were a couple of cautions late that caused a couple of green, white, checkered attempts before it was finally settled. We were able to move up some more and ended up crossing the line in 2nd place. We didn’t win, but after feeling the air get taken out of our balloon late in the race when we fell back and then to come back and finish 2nd, it was great. We didn’t lead any laps or win the race, but we again won the 2nd most money of the race which puts us 1st on the money won list so far for the series and we’ll take that. The 3rd race of the series is at Seekonk Speedway on July 1st and we are looking forward to it.