Luck and the chassis setup weren't going the team's way, and although Chris qualified on pole, the race was under more difficult conditions, and third was the best Carr could do on this particular day.
Garnering nine wins in AMA competition and earning the coveted Grand National Championship for a third time left no reason to complain, however. Chris looks forward to finding some new sponsors for 2002 and going after it again.
"It's one of those things where the track changes during practice/qualifying, and we didn't make the changes with it, so we kind of got behind as the day went along.
"I have to give it to Rich King, he was better than us when it came time for the main event. He was riding good His bike was probably set up better than mine - and I tell you what, I did everything I could to keep up with him and just couldn't do it.
"There's really no excuses from our end, we just flat-out got beat. There's no other way to say it."
What about the track conditions this year?
"The track was a lot better than it was last year, I know that for a fact. In the seven or so years we've been going there, this was probably the second best track, behind the track we had in '99. It was fairly smooth, but again, the biggest problem when we come to this place is vision. The dirt that goes up with the chemicals on it just kind of sticks to everything, and it's kind of like riding through a shower of WD-40. You can't get rid of that stuff. You can't wipe your tear-offs to save them, you have to rip them off. I ran pretty much no further back than third place the whole race, and I went through 14 tear-offs in 20 laps. I can only imagine what the guys in the middle or the back of the pack were going through as far as visibility was concerned.
"We want to be able to run a full race, we'd like to be able to do a 25-lap race, but I just didn't see that place working that way. "
If you could sum up your year in just a few sentences, what would you say?
"We set ourselves a goal to gout out and win the championship, and we accomplished that. We did what needed to be done along the way to get it done. The guys worked hard. Everything was set up good for us week in and week out. We were pretty solid.
"Every time we made a change, it seemed to work - all year long. We always went forward in making the bikes better - we rarely took a step backwards. We had some good luck along the way as well. The combination of good equipment, good luck, and the fact that I felt like I rode as good or better than I ever have in my career...we were able to rack up nine wins. It was what we had set out to do in the beginning."