Sometimes the quickest path is the easiest, but that wouldn’t be the case for the #27 Mighty Mouse sprinter and team this past Saturday at Jackson Speedway.
The team felt good after pulling in the gate and having a decent draw for the evening’s event, but that would quickly fade as they discovered a leaky radiator upon opening up the trailer door. Quickly, they put a replacement in, and felt like the evening would go well. After starting on the front row of the 2nd heat race, a touchy race track, and a bad first corner would relegate the team to 5th by the end, but that wasn’t the problem in the end. “The more I stepped on the throttle, the hotter the engine got.” Stated Jody. The team quickly prepared a new radiator for the car and without the aid of an intermission were able to get repairs made and the car ready for the feature. Starting 13th for the A feature event, Jody quickly made his way into the top 10. It would only take him a handful of laps to make his way to 7th before a caution came out. It wouldn’t take long for him to shine again as he made his way to 5th over the course of the next few laps. Around the midway point in the race, the track took rubber and after the 2nd running car fell out, the team settled for a 4th place finishing position. Team owner Jason Johnson commented, “After all that we went through tonight to get to where we ended up is pretty satisfying. If the track hadn’t of taken rubber, we might have made some noise with the leaders there as long as cautions fell our way, which they pretty much did. It was a night we just needed to start further forward because of the rubbered down condition. I have to thank Jeff Johnson and Kenny Netsch for all the help they gave us tonight. Without them being around we’d have never gotten everything accomplished since we were down on crew members for the night. It’s great to have help like that when they’re around….they’ve both been around the sprint car deal for so many years and are so knowledgeable. I basically handed over the wrenches to Kenny there after the heat and turned him loose! We think so much alike when it comes to setting up the car, that even when he would ask what I thought…I pretty much just agreed with him. It’s kind of strange because when he says what he wants to do it’s almost identical if not identical to what I’d do myself. Now that we got that bad luck out of the way, I hope this turns around so we get a little good luck. It was so good last year; I think this year is the yin to the yang from last year!”
The team looks forward to competing this weekend with the ASCS Northern Plains region at I 90 Speedway in Hartford, SD and then Husets with possibly a stop at Jackson in between.