By Dave Sully - THOROLD, ON- The Williamson Racing Team’s fortunes at Merrittville continued to suffer, even with a new frame and a host of changes. Entering the night with some anticipation after gutting out a twelfth place finish in the “Battle of the Border” on Wednesday, the hope was that they had a plan to shrug off their recent woes at their home track. However, it didn’t turn out that way, as a fourth place finish in his heat, right where he started, put Mat in the tenth starting spot for the feature.
Any thought about moving up was lost at the drop of the green, and Mat eventually found himself just trying to stay on the lead lap as he and arch rival Mike Bowman were at one time battling for fifteenth in the race won by Tim Jones. Bowman was lapped, just before a caution on lap 30 saved Mat from the same fate. Only some late race heroics by Mat salvaged a disappointing twelfth place finish.
The most disconcerting part of the finish was that the car never showed any signs that it could move forward and Mat had to drive the wheels off it to salvage the finish that he got.
Mat’s bewilderment was evident, as he observed, “We worked on the car all week. I don’t know what the heck we’re doing wrong. I never felt so bad. It just keeps getting worse and worse. We’re working on the car more than ever. We’re doing more maintenance than ever. We’re doing more tire work than ever. We’re working on the thing three times more than we used to, and we’re going three times slower. I just don’t understand it.”
“The racing game is tough. If it was easy, everybody would do it, but I don’t know any more.”
“We’re definitely not going to give up. We’ll keep working on this thing all summer until we win one of these races. It’s frustrating when we can go and race the best guys in the Northeast and come in second, and come from the back and have a chance to win those races given a decent starting position. Then we come to our home track and race some of the best guys in the Niagara region, and they’re tough to beat, but we can’t get out of our own way. We can’t be that way at our home track, when we can go six hours down the road to a track we see twice a year and contend for a win. That’s the frustrating part. We know we should be winning. My program is top notch. My guys work as hard as anybody else and it’s tough not to win.”
There are all kinds of clichés that apply here to solve the dilemma, perhaps the most appropriate being, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” A little luck might help as well. Look at it this way. When you’re down, there is only one direction you can go, and when it does, the smell of success will be much sweeter.
No comments:
Post a Comment