We had such a great race! At first, I was just so frustrated to finish in 11th after how hard we fought. I had to remind myself that the vehicles that finished in front of us are people that are consistent podium finishers or close to it. In hindsight, we didn’t run a perfect race. Our one poor choice to run a line we had only tried once in pre-running resulted in a rear flat tire. That set off a series of events that led to us losing 20+ minutes in various forms, and set us up to miss the top 10 by mere minutes.
Super proud of Hunter for turning in one of his best performances in qualifying. This is an area we routinely struggle with and he was so tuned in and calm we felt like we were able to control our run completely, now we just improve our speed! Our race started great, when we took a line we had only pre-runonce to avoid a stuck car we found it had really sharp rocks and tree stump. Only one rear tire was sliced but that was enough to start a chain reaction. We were confident we could make it back to pits on the flat, but we didn’t think (in time) how that flat would affect us in the sand. We sank to our axle in a sand hill climb and couldn’t move. I had to get out and find rocks to stack behind our tires since we were at a place with no winch point. After being passed by several cars and getting completely buried in red dirt I was able to get enough rocks under tires to give Ginger momentum backwards and get out of the sand hill. Hunter brought us back to pit, where we had a great tire change by our awesome crew! Back on course, Hunter drove fast and really pushed hard. He made it up the Brittany joker line in less than 1 minute, making it look super easy. We even joked that maybe we should just do it every lap for fun. We came across a car upside down with flames coming out of the engine compartment, and it seemed the driver was still inside. Another team stopped and helped pull him out of the car, and put the fire out. The driver of the upside-down car was ok but with the flames out and the driver encouraged to sit and wait for recovery we decided the best thing to do was move on. I had unknowingly turned my radio volume off in the struggle to get back into the car when we were stuck so we didn’t think we were receiving comms from pits but they could hear us. We called in to our own crew and asked them to relay to weatherman that a driver needed assistance. Thankfully multiple other cars did the same so help was on the way by the time we left. We kept pushing to make up time from our, now 3, unplanned stops. 100 yards from the finish found us in a line of cars behind a broken vehicle that was blocking course. Recovery crew was letting them keep attempting and everyone’s frustration was mounting, horns, sirens, and lots of cussing could be heard in the bottom of the line. Our crew was frantically trying to spot us a way around, our time wasn’t stopping just because the finish line was blocked. Hunter spotted a side hill above the other cars that put us on the rim of the obstacle and would, in theory, walk us around and above everyone and line us up to cross the timing chip. We took a shot and I just crossed my fingers that we wouldn’t roll off onto the cars below. Sure enough we powered around 4 more cars and made it to the finish.
This was as close to the top ten as we have finished that wasn’t by attrition, we fought to be there. What we found out is the top ten is an intense, aggressive place to be. Unspoken rules are a little different that close to the front and we weren’t mentally ready. It is awesome to be that close to reaching our goal ofbeing in the top 10 finishers. I feel like now we will be mentally prepared for the different driving and mindset that is required to be up there. Some newbie mistakes this race did remind us to stay in check, the little things are still super important. I am so glad we had such a great crew. I can’t thank our pit crew enough for the quick tire change and their amazing support the entire weekend with two cars!!