Well, got the carb cleaned up and hopefully fixed, adjusted the valves and did some general maintenance and I am back for round 2!

This time out I was actually able to run some hot laps, not that they can really tell me anything. About the only thing you can take from a session of hot laps is if everything is working or not. The car seems to be running better. A step in the right direction. Oh, hey! By the way, I actually had a pit crew tonight…sort of. My oldest son, Brandon came with me for his first time, into the pits. He has been waiting for this for years, to be old enough to be able to come down and help out.

I started off by "jinxing myself" by telling Brandon that by the looks of the heat race lineup, that I shouldn't have any problems transferring directly to the "A". Well, as it turned out, I missed the setup a bit and ended up finishing 5th. Only the top 4 transferred. This will be the first time in at least a couple years that I have had to run a "B" feature. That's OK, I guess, more track time.

The car seems to be running well, however, the car seems to be stuck too well to the track. I can't get the rear end to break loose in the corners to be able to free it up to turn more RPM's and really point the car where I want it to go. I am kind of stuck running the top. To be honest, I don't really remember too much about the "B" other than I started 3rd and finished 3rd behind Cris Gunderson (89) and Scott Rick (97). On to the "A".

I was not looking forward to starting the "A" from 19th out of 20 cars. The way the hobby features have been in the past, starting this far back is usually a test of survival dodging wrecks and trying not to get involved in one. In the first three laps, it seemed to be chaos in front of me, but everyone was doing a pretty good job at not wrecking. My progress was better than expected, but not nearly good enough to get up front by the end of the race. I had passed 3 cars by the time the first caution came out. When we were getting lined up for the restart, I punched it to get caught up and the car felt like it came out of gear. I tried putting it back in gear only to find that it was in gear. Something broke. I pulled 'er in and ended up with a 19th place finish. Not a good way to keep second place in the points.

Come to find out later, was I had broken the input shaft on my transmission. I was hoping that the input shaft was the only thing wrong, because Tim Waltner gave me one of his spares to fix it. I am starting to like Tim more all the time. He has been a great help to me two weeks in a row now. Once again, thanks Tim! Unfortunately, when the tranny was taken apart to be fixed, it was discovered that there had been more damage than thought and the whole transmission had to be given a decent funeral. It had served it's purpose faithfully for 4 years with no troubles. I guess it was time to retire!

Time to search for a new transmission. Oh, joy!

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