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9/24-25/04

CarrTakes Title Number Six in DuQuoin

(l to r) Kenny Tolbert, Chris Carr, and Pam Carr were all smiles after Chris accepted the number one plate from AMA officials following the DuQuoin short track.

With a 44-point lead in the AMA Progressive Insurance Flat Track Championship heading into the final weekend of the 2004 season, all Chris Carr had to do to secure his sixth title was to make either main event of the DuQuoin double header. He would then clinch at least a tie, and he would win the tie based upon more event wins.

There wasn't any complicated mathematics necessary, at least not for long, as Chris won heat race number five on Saturday evening at the short track and quickly put any doubts to rest. With many of the executives of top sponsor Ford Quality Checked Certified Pre-Owned Vehicles present, there was lots of reasons to celebrate in the Carr pit area, but there was a race to run first, and the team kept their focus on that.

It wasn't a particularly good result - Chris got a mediocre start and then fell two laps into the 30-lap main event, unable to kick start his KTM and rejoin the fray. A red flag halted proceedings on lap nine and allowed Carr to join at the back of the single-file restart, but his eventual finish of fifteenth was the worst of the year. No matter, the battle was lost but the war had already been won.

At the Magic Mile on Sunday, hopes were high for a top finish, as they always are for the Ford QCCPOV team. Practice and qualifying heats proved a bit frustrating, but the team made wholesale changes to the bike setup before the main event, completing the work just in time for the green flag. The changes proved to be the right choice and Carr took a hard-earned third at the checkered flag. Afterwards, Carr thanked all of those who made it possible and began looking forward to the 2005 season.

Carr took an unfortunate soil sample in the short track, but he had already clinched the title by winning his heat race.

Short Track

"Well, we did what we needed to do to start off with to clinch the championship, and that was holeshot the heat race, basically. Indoor short tracks, anything can happen, and I got off the line ahead of Bryan Bigelow and he kept me honest. He probably could have stuffed it up there a couple of times, but he chose not to, and we did what we needed to do: we got first or second in our heat race, that put us in the main event, and that locked it up for us.
"As for the main event, I got a fair start, but I was kind of pinned up high a little bit, and I went into one and two on the second lap, and I guess a couple of guys in front of me got together, and I hit the brakes and proceeded to stall my bike and slid the thing onto the ground. I picked it up as soon as I could, and couldn't get going from that point on. I tried bump starting the thing, and I think I knocked into third gear, and I needed about fifty miles an hour with that kind of gearing to get the thing started, so I was content to sit and watch the rest of the race. I would have just been in the way at that point.

"Then a red flag came out. I had an opportunity to get back out on the track and use it as a 22-lap test session from that point on to try and learn a little bit more about the KTM and see if we could try and get some direction and develop that thing a little better for next year. That's what we did. I still don't know what place I got."

Mile

Behind eventual winner Kevin Atherton, Carr led a fierce battle for second during most of the DuQuoin Mile.

"The mile was a case of Kevin Atherton being on a different planet than the rest of us. I was fairly competitive with the other guys, but I thought we weren't as competitive as we could have been and Kenny (Tolbert) felt the same way. We had been running a standard fire, and the guys that were going fast were all on twingles, so he decided after the heat race that he was going to make ours a twingle so that we didn't have to go to the back of the pack. Both are bikes were straight up anyway, so we had to choose one of them.

"(Kenny) worked real hard, got the thing twingled up, got it tuned as best he could for being there at the race track, and we went out and we were competitive in the main event, which we somewhat expected, but we weren't as competitive as Kevin Atherton was. I give him a lot of credit, he was going fast. We used the data to play around a little bit, to try something we normally wouldn't do, and it seemed to work pretty good, so we may use that as an option down the road."

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