A heat race win buoyed the team's hopes, but the main could only produce a fifth place, with challenger Davis on top of the box in first. Skipping the upcoming Sedalia AMA round to compete at the wrenchead.com round in Ft. Worth this weekend may put Chris back to second in AMA points, but the goal at the moment is winning the Wrenchead Series, and that's what Carr will go out and fight for.
"We thought we were a threat to win this week. It started off well, I came from behind in the heat race, passed George Roeder and was able to put a good move on Rich King in turns three and four on the last lap to win the heat race. We were sitting on the front row thinking we might have a chance at running with those guys for a change.
"We had made a few changes prior to the main event hoping that it would help us make up a tenth(of a second) or two, and it turns out it hurt us a tenth or two. I struggled around and ended up a fairly solid fifth place. Take it and move on. Considering that last year there, I was on the ground and barely walking when I left the joint, I'm happy to say that I walked out of there on my own will and...on to the next one."
You still have the AMA points lead, but you are skipping the next AMA race at Sedalia to race the wrenchead.com PACE event at Texas Motor Speedway. Do you know what your AMA title challenger Will Davis will be doing?
"I have a pretty good idea that Will will be at Sedalia, and we're obviously going to be at Texas, so he's going to have a good shot at taking the point lead back. It's one of those things where we expect it going in. We were trying to build up as big a point lead as we could and took a small step backwards this last weekend, but it just puts more emphasis on the triple-header weekend at Springfield. We're looking forward to going there and doing well, but right now my focus is on trying to catch Hacker in the Wrenchead Series. He's been doing real good, and it's my understanding that he's going to be down there in Texas, so I'm looking forward to running against him. He's having a great year. We'll see how things go down there."
What do you think about the upcoming Springfield triple-header?
"I think it's a great opportunity for the racers and the teams, anytime you can go and race for basically four times for money than you do in a (typical) weekend, even thought you have to spread it out over a three-day weekend, I mean that's good for the economics of dirt track racing for all of us. This weekend at Hagerstown, we raced for a $37,500 purse. Now we're going to Springfield in a couple of weeks with $187,500 up for grabs. Even though it's over three days, it's a pretty good average per day to race for."
Your record at Springfield is pretty good as well...
"Yeah. As far as the short track, it's kind of like going to (the) Daytona (short track) for the first time. We've all seen the facility when we were there in May, obviously it was still under construction at the time, but it looks like a neat little place. What kind of racetrack they can make out of it will remain to be seen."