No one said it was going to be easy when the team unloaded at Volusia Speedway Park inBarberville, Florida, and it wasn’t. Moving from a small block to a big block doesn’t seem like a quantum leap, but most drivers, including Mat, will tell you it’s not as seamless as it looks. There are significant differences in the two cars, and when you find yourself on the national stage while you’re sorting things out, it can be daunting.
Of his first impression of Volusia, he observed, “It was good. It’s fast, definitely fast. The big block is a different animal. I just have to get more seat time to figure out how to tame it.”
The team was allowed to hot lap on Tuesday night and Mat was about in the middle of the field as far as lap times. He got a little better, and then the rest of the field began to get faster. When they time trialed for the first race on Wednesday, Mat was near the bottom of his group, which forced him to start near the back of his heat. “The track changed and I didn’t have the experience to figure it out as fast as everybody else did,” he noted.
He ended up finishing eighth out of ten cars, which put him seventh on the grid for his consi. He had a good run in the consi and grabbed the third and final qualifying spot for the feature, pretty heady stuff for sure. “I was pretty pumped up. I found the outside before everybody else did. We got some breaks that put us into a qualifying position. We were good once we got to the consi. Up until then we were struggling. Even in the feature I think we went a step backward after the consi.”
In the feature, he started 25th and was able to move up as high as 19th when he had a problem with tear-offs. “When we came to the feature later on I didn’t have time to put enough tear-offs on, went out with fourteen and ran out by lap 8. We have to conserve them. We’ve taken some measures, like taping off the wind screen.” The tear-off problem made him decide to pull in on lap 25 of the 30 lapper. While Mat ran out of tear-offs early in the race, he was not alone. Brett Hearn, Matt Sheppard, HJ Bunting, and several others were plagued with the same problem due to the track conditions.
Of the effort in the feature, Mat opined, “I don’t know if it was more the car, or if I couldn’t see in the feature. We’re going to figure it out for tomorrow. We’re going to scale it over. Matt (Sheppard) helped us a lot with the setup tonight. Hopefully, we’ll get there.”
Still in all it was a good learning experience and the team looked forward to Thursday night with guarded optimism.
No comments:
Post a Comment