Friday night, August 2nd, the team made the six hour haul to Lernerville, and came home solidly in first place. Racing with his nearest rival in the point chase, Brian Schwarzlander, Mat was in contention all night, but came up just short of the win. A heat victory, with the points awarded, made the night a wash in points with four races to go.
Mat explained, “Brian started outside of us and he got to the front first. We had to play chase and weren’t fast enough to get him. We missed the setup a little bit. We were fast in the heat. We should have left the car (alone), but we changed it and loosened it up too much. I just couldn’t get around as fast as he could. It was all right. We’ll take second place any day of the week. We won the heat, so we didn’t lose any points to him and just have to keep it rolling for the last four weeks.”
The team hoped to keep the momentum up at Merrittville on Saturday, where they’ve gotten things turned around recently. It didn’t quite go the way they would have liked, but it could have been a lot worse. A jingle early in the race forced Mat to play catch up and he was able to salvage a good finish after coming from the back.
Mat talked about the night, saying, “We were fast. I think we were fast enough to win. We started ninth and eventually we got racing with Scott Wood, and he spun out in front of us. I had nowhere to go and got caught up in the wreck. It was one of those deals where you know it’s your night and just got caught up in somebody else’s problem. I can’t complain. We ended up sixth after that deal. I think the top three cars were the only ones that didn’t get caught up in a wreck. The car was wicked. I can’t say enough about it. We were the fastest car on the race track, I think.”
On Sunday, the team made the short hop over to Humberstone for the prestigious All Canadian Championships and, as he has been often this year, Erick Rudolph was the class of the field, while Mat and Mike Bowman battled for the runner-up spot, which ultimately went to Bowman.
Mat related, “We started third and finished third. Erick was faster than anybody there. He got by me and Bowman and, with the sun going down, we couldn’t see much going down the back straightway, so it didn’t make it very racy, but I’ll take third place. We had two top fives this weekend, should have been three, but we’ve just got to keep it going.”
On Monday, the much anticipated 100 lap Bob St. Amand Memorial, a Super Dirt Series Big Block event, attracted 41 cars, 18 of them Big Blocks. The team chose to run the Small Block. Following time trials, Mat started sixth in the fourth heat and raced his way to second, which put him in the redraw, where he ended up with the seventh starting spot.
After dropping back early, the car came to life in the second half of the race, which was won handily by Matt Sheppard. The No. 6 car was able to find the right groove and pedaled to a nice top five, passing Dale Planck and Pete Bicknell in the process.
Talking about the race, Mat declared, “We weren’t very good for the first fifty or so laps. The last fifty we were kind of hanging in there until the last restart (lap 85), and we started to roll the outside. The car was good tonight, just had to do so much to get there. These guys are good (The top three were Sheppard, Danny Johnson, and Brett Hearn) and the problem you’ve got is if you’re off a little bit, you’re struggling. That was our problem the first fifty laps. We put new tires on and didn’t heat cycle them. It took a while for them to come in. Once they did, we were good. Maybe if it had been two hundred laps we would have raced Matt, but he was fast.”
We passed Dale and Pete. We passed Alan (Johnson). It was good once we got rolling on the outside. I knew I had to do something. It was good that it finally came around to us. It was really slick the last fifty laps. It was a little slick before that, but it didn’t dry completely until then. Once we got strung out on single file restarts we were good. You can’t give up ever. It showed tonight. I was happy we got a top five out of it.”
With scant little rest, though Mat said he got a good night’s sleep on Sunday, the team headed to Lake Odessa, in Western Michigan on Tuesday for the second appearance of the Super Dirt Series Big Blocks at the five eighths mile, I-96 Speedway. Things were going well, and Mat was running up near the front in the feature when the motor suddenly lost power and Mat wisely steered it into the pits, ultimately scored in 18th place.
Mat described the night, observing, “It’s a fast place. It’s actually really fast. I like it. It’s good. Things were going great. We had a great race car. We started sixth and were up to second, racing with Matt (Sheppard). Brett (Hearn, the eventual winner) kind of walked away from us. There was a caution, and I noticed that the motor lost power, so I drove it to the pits rather than do anything stupid. We broke a valve spring. We lost out on a good run. Maybe it could have been a win. It was just unfortunate that we were running good when this stuff happened.”
Overall, it was a wonderful effort by the team to persevere through the five race stint, with plenty of travel along the way. Mat deserves a lot of credit for running as well as he did over that period. It takes a lot of physical stamina to run that many laps, not to mention the mental stress of adjusting to five totally different race tracks and surfaces. Congratulations to the team for a great job with the cars, as well. Racing, after all, is a team sport and the team was up to the challenge, with more to come.
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