Doubleheader: Bergenty on Martinsville and Texas
Alrighty. I have found a few minutes since I last wrote and when I mean a few. Yes, I mean a few. It’s been a very busy last week or so. Racing at Martinsville which is only about 2 hours away means the boys all drove up in some nice soccer mom vans. Then with this week being in Texas, the haulers needed to leave a little earlier than normal which meant Monday and Tuesday were crammed. Then I will state the obvious and say that when I get a few free minutes with my wife and kid I’m going to take it. Got to take care of the important stuff!!
No need to fear because it’s a fabulous cold and windy day here in Texas and because NASCAR made such a nice schedule I have a few minutes before our team dinner. So, for any young readers out there thinking that working in the cup garage is all fancy. Let me give you the gist of this weekend so far. I woke up at 5 am Friday to be at the airport for an 8 am departure to the Lone Star State. Hit up the Buc-ee’s for some beef jerky and the garage opened at 11 am.
As I have previously stated in my blogs, Fridays suck for us right now. When I mean suck…KB is badass at Texas and we have managed to qualify 30th. What a joke. Ok, so simple math. If Kurt is one of the better drivers here and we qualified 30th I would say we brought a 60th place car, right? Not the case. I think we were somewhere around 5th in practice. The car has speed and then in qualifying, we just screw it all up with chassis balance and not timing the draft correctly. This brings us to the nice warm spring weather on Saturday for practice, right? Yea.
So again, this is where your chicken salad is turning into chicken shit. The garage closed at 9 pm Friday then opened today at 6:30 am Saturday. We stay 30 minutes away. My roommate likes to sleep so I usually get up before him to use the shower. OK, Ryan, that’s about a 4:30 wake up call. Go out in front of the hotel and it’s a nice 65°. Get to the track and it quickly becomes 45°, rainy, and winds about 397 MPH!
Canceled first practice. Sounds like fun, right? Well, we finally got happy-hour completed and the car has speed again. If we backtrack this correctly we have a common theme going on. Race-trim good. Qualifying-trim BAD! So, as I sit here I can say I feel like we have a solid car for tomorrow but it’s always tough starting that far back. We’re gonna give it hell though.
I am sure by this point you’re wondering how we got from Fontana to Texas. Didn’t we race Martinsville? Yea someone did. Just not quite sure it was us. I’ll give you the two cents version and save you a minute of your life.
Martinsville. Growing up a short track racer that’s like the bread and butter. Everyone in the garage is chomping at the bit to go there and get a clock (the iconic trophy at Martinsville is a grandfather clock). You work so hard to build the best car for that place and then in our case you unload, and you’re junk. We didn’t have any good practices. Didn’t qualify or race well. Towards the end of the race, KB just wheeled his butt off and got us a few spots. I guess finishing 12th isn’t a complete disaster but it’s frustrating. Like I have stated previously, this team wants to win. Not only win but dominate. It was a frustrating week at Martinsville and it bothered the hell out of me to not contend. Nothing else really was special enough about the weekend that I should let you know.
Standard Martinsville stuff. Hotels are what you expect, Elizabeth’s Pizza is the go-to and the ride home to the shop is never complete without a stop at one of the fast food chains with a $60 charge on Chip’s credit card for the boys. (FYI don’t go ratting me out to Chip either! The boys deserved it!)
This is going to end up being a two-part blog. What I mean by that is I must get going soon so I’m not late for the team dinner tonight. After that, I’m gonna go play some Xbox with the boys. It’s really picked up intensity lately too. We have been playing NHL 19’ with all the rules turned off. Like everything goes. It’s a mess. Its 2 vs 2. Smashing goalies, trash talking, not telling your teammate any secrets because the next game you might be playing against him and all the other stuff that goes along with releasing your inner high school childish ways. It’s a good release for the guys to just have fun and this Xbox travels the country with us. Well, I am out of time for now. Hopefully, when I finish this blog off I’ll be on the airplane back to NC telling you some good news about the race. For now, I need to eat, the cars solid and the weather sucks in Texas today. Peace!
Hi folks,
Here we are on the plane on our way home from Texas and Ryan is in a decent mood. We had an up and down kind of day but at the end of the day, we got ourselves a respectful result, 9th-place. Now obviously by now, you understand that 9th-place isn’t acceptable right? Correct it isn’t unless you have days like today. The day started off uneventful and the boys got the car prepped for the race nicely.
Slid through inspection with no issues, grabbed some lunch, had our team meeting and off to the grid for pre-race festivities. Now in case you haven’t figured out yet but when you’re sponsored by Monster you get a few of those pretty looking ladies standing by your car during pre-race. Which in turn means we have more than enough people trying to hang out around our car. But this weekend it wasn’t so much about the Monster girls as it was for our partner GearWrench.
Last week I got roped into a little video and photo shoot at the shop to help put together some material for the debut of the GearWrench car this week. So as soon as GearWrench released some photos of the car and what we did this week my mother-in-law went ahead and tagged me on every social media site in under 16 seconds. I am not sure how she isn’t running Facebook by now.
Anyways enough of this nonsense let’s get back to the race today. Once all the PR stuff was done and the green flag dropped my first reaction was basically… “Wow, we really messed this thing up.” KB was screaming loose, loose, loose. OK so we get about 10 laps in and get some heat in our tires and we start going forward. Every short racer knows, you want fresh tires but hot tires, right? Yea well we had fresh tires but because it was 50* out we didn’t get the hot tires for the first few laps. Then as the day went on our car showed good speed.
Once the middle of the race hit, we were running top 5. At one point, Kurt’s baby brother made an aggressive move on the front stretch and about wadded us all up going into turn one. I had a flashback of sometime in the early 2000’s when Kyle wrecked Kurt at the All-Star race. Remember that. Pretty sure it was the blue deuce and 5 Kellogg’s car.
Running solid until KB1 comes on the radio and here we go. Right front tire issue. Coming apart, tires loose, vibrating. Something is going on and I could only think Why? We had to pit under green with a right front tire coming apart. That’s 19 years of Cup series experience that kept us from cutting a tire and hitting the fence. But we rebounded. At one point we got back to 5th after pitting under green and losing a lap. That goes to show how good of a car the boys brought this weekend. Plenty of speed! All that nonsense compounded with a long-run late in the race we cycled-out to finish 9th.
So, after a day that we could have easily been in the fence, I will take the P9 result. NASCAR took our car along with 5 others for some annual wind tunnel and engine testing. They do this a few times a year to get some data on manufactures and see how the field stacks up to one another. But it’s a good feeling when they want to take your car. It usually means you’re running worth a damn.
I will wrap things up here. After a little feedback, I have learned the last blog may have been a little too long. So, if you have made it this far and care to take a minute I appreciate the feedback, good and bad, to understand what you want to hear about. Again, I am not an English major and knowing what I really should be talking about is a stretch. Any help with sharing on social media or any cool networking stuff is appreciated. We’re about an hour from landing in NC and I have a few things I need to get done before then. All my Texas post-event stuff is complete and now onto Bristol. Oh, hey if you didn’t know. KB1 gets around that joint damn good. My pick is for a Ganassi car to win next weekend!
RB