August 19, 2006
South Boston, VA

Solid Progress in Top Ten Run at South Boston

Josh’s day probably should have been even better than a 7th place finish at South Boston Speedway on Saturday night when the Allison Legacy Series competed on the 4/10 mile oval. However; compared to the first run there earlier in the summer, there was a huge improvement. The only practice of the day had the Horizon Technologies/Conterra Ultra Broadband Monte Carlo lingering around the top ten in speeds, but everyone knew that we were off from where we needed to be. After the practice, crew chief Blake Harris made some changes to the #11 in order to free the car up for qualifying. While Josh turned his fastest lap of the day, and was over a tenth of a second faster than his qualifying effort in May, his qualifying lap was only good enough to put him 8th in the field and still left everyone scratching their heads for more speed.

With only 15 minutes to work on the car between qualifying and the 50 lap main event, Blake Harris went to work throwing numerous changes at Josh’s car in an attempt to run with the top cars. We all decided that we would rather try something and be wrong…instead of just accepting a probable 10th to 15th place race car. At the start of the 50 lap race Josh found a hole on the bottom in 9th place and went to work. We knew by lap three that the car was much better than it had been as Josh was turning laps 2 to 3 tenths of a second faster than his qualifying run. By the first caution on lap 10 Josh had moved to 7th place and was running 6th when the caution flew again five laps later. With five very good cars in front of him, Josh sat in 6th place over the long green flag run to the finish…working the back bumper of the 5th place car most of the time. A lapped car slowed his progress with about 15 laps to go and separated 4th and 5th place by 10 car lengths to Josh. Once past the lapped car Josh again pulled to the bumper of the cars in front of him and with four laps to go got inside the 5th place car going into turn one. The two cars ran side by side (as Josh fought a slight tight car) over the next lap and a half and Josh cleared the car between turns one and two coming to the white flag. The 5th spot was short lived, however; as the other driver took advantage of Josh’s tight condition and got back under Josh coming out of turn two. Josh, along with the eventual 5th and 6th place cars, ran side by side for the final lap and a half with Josh coming home a hard fought 7th.

Josh on Saturday’s race: “I had a lot of fun today racing with those guys…it’s great to be competitive and to run so much better than we did the last time we were here. Blake made some great changes to the car before the race and it felt better than it had all day. I got caught up in some lapped traffic and that really hurt me…if I could have gotten through that traffic clean we probably would have had a top five, but all in all it was a good day. Hopefully we can make the same kind of progress in a couple weeks at Florence Speedway…we didn’t run well there in early May, but now I’m excited to go back and see what we can do.”

The Allison Legacy Series has this weekend off before they head to Florence Motor Speedway in Timmonsville, SC for a 50 lap event on Saturday September 2nd. The weekend will be great practice for the 200 lap “Autumn Championship” that the Legacy cars will run at Florence in early November.