Chris was aboard the Daytona-winning Vor again and the rider/bike combination still carried plenty of momentum from Bike Week. The Ford QCCPOV-backed team promptly recorded the fastest heat race time, securing pole position for the 30-lap main. With track position on the Tunica bullring critical, the rest of the field was in for a Carr Show - the blonde Pennsylvanian smoothly checked out and looked like a shoe-in for two in a row.
A red flag for Steve Beattie's crash forced a single-file restart with 21 laps complete. Beattie got up bruised but okay, and the nine-lap sprint that followed was truly a barn-burner. Garth Bastian rode a near-perfect race, passing both Chris and KTM's Joe Kopp, then holding them at bay until the checkered flag.
Carr's enthusiasm for a clean-but-mean racing tussle is unmistakable in his report.
The season is off to a spectacular start. Carr leads Johnny Murphree and a horde of pursuing hotshoes by nine points after only two races. The Lancaster H-D-supported team is firmly in control, although momentum is not even an issue with nearly nine weeks to go until the next race at the Springfield TT.
"But they did a real good job prior to the heat races getting a little water down, they started digging the track up a little bit at a time, and we finally got a track that opened up more than just one line. From that point on, the racing - certainly from the semis on - was fantastic. The heat races were all actually rather boring, but I was a fan as well as a racer, because I would've paid twenty bucks to be a spectator, too! It was pretty cool. A lot of the races were closely contested.
"Fortunately for the fans, the main event on Saturday night was red-flagged, otherwise, I might have made that one boring too. But that last nine laps was worth the price of admission, I'm sure.
"I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to win, but everybody left happy and a pretty nice young man won the race, Garth Bastian, so that was cool.
"It was short tracking at its finest, to be honest with you. I can't remember when - I think the last short track that was near as exciting was (Bryan)Bigelow's got his first win when he and (Tommy) Hayden and (J.R.) Schanbel were going at it at Springfield - that was an exciting race. This one here was certainly every bit as exciting, if not more."