At this point, we think it’s safe to say that our racing program is moving in the right direction. We are still relatively new to it, but we are quickly learning how to make our cars fast and reliable.
For quite a while now, we had been planning to attend the Elite Dirt Oval Series event in Yukon, OK last weekend. We knew that there would be a ton of fast cars at this race, so a few weeks ago we set out to get some extra practice before the big day.
To do that, Chase and Coach drove in the club race at Thompson RC Raceway in Justin, TX and the CMC Super Cup Series race at the same track.
We both had decent finishes in all of our races – Chase won the Street Stock division at the club race and Coach ran 2nd! Coach even got to race against very well respected RC driver Mark Santa Maria! For anyone who is wondering, he is exactly the same in real life as he is on his YouTube channel.
More importantly, we had some struggles that helped us learn how to get our cars dialed in before heading to Oklahoma.
At those two races, we had some issues with our servos and pinion gears failing and also realized that our street stock motors needed to be replaced. Armed with that new knowledge and a good setup on all four cars, we felt very prepared to take on the Elite.
When we arrived at Taylor Park Speedway, we weren’t disappointed. The track was in perfect shape and this was a huge race with 197 cars entered.
We started off in Street Stock and – to be honest – this class was a bit of a roller coaster for us.
In the qualifying round we both ran some fast laps. Coach even ran first in his group and 8th overall. That had us feeling like we were definitely on the right track.
But we didn’t make the right adjustments to the car as the track changed throughout the day. Both of us finished toward the back of both of our heats and landed in the C-Main.
As depressing as it is to be stuck in the C, we were determined to learn as much as we could. We worked hard to finish off strong and turned some very fast laps in that race.
We’re pretty sure we learned a few things in that race that will make us faster. That’s a win in our book so we were pretty happy as we finished up our Street Stock racing for the day.
That left MudBoss. We were both fast all day in this class and finished up qualifying with very competitive times.
In the first heat, Coach had a fast car but made a few driver errors and finished up in 5th. Chase was a different story – he had a fast car and drove well. He ended up 3rd in his heat.
The second heat… that was Annihilation Racing at its best. Both Coach AND Chase won their heats, landing each of us a spot in the night’s A-Main trophy race.
Chase started 2nd in that race, while Coach was 3 spots behind in 5th. After a strong start, we both ran in the top 5 for most of the race. Unfortunately, Coach made a couple of mistakes late that dropped him back to a 7th place finish.
Chase was much more solid throughout. He had a couple of bobbles but stayed consistently good from green to checkers. Amazingly, he earned a 5th place finish for Annihilation Racing!!!
We are extremely excited to have a podium finish at a race of this caliber. It tells us that we are definitely moving in the right direction with our race program.
While this weekend proved we can be competitive with the fastest drivers, it’s also only a 5th place finish so we’ve still got a lot of room to grow!!!
