3/15/05

Daytona Podium Bodes Well for Another Championship Run

If there's any track on the Grand National circuit where just about anything can happen, Daytona Municipal Stadium is that track. Champions occasionally sit on the sidelines while virtually unknown local racers make the main and sometimes even win the race.

So, when Chris Carr finished second in this year's running of the Bike Week opener, there's an almost audible sigh of relief heard among the Ford Quality-Checked Team as they put Daytona behind them and move on to the rest of the season. In the past, Chris suffered much worse finishes here and still charged on to the title.

There's nearly ten weeks until the next race at Route 66 Speedway's half-mile oval outside of Chicago opens the next chapter of 2005.

"Daytona was almost great, but very good otherwise. You never know what's going to happen when you go into that place. You have to get good starts, and we were able to get pretty good starts all night long with the one exception of my scratch heat. I didn't get off the line very well and I had to work a little harder than I wanted to to get by the guys and get to the front. I ended up having the eighth-fastest scratch heat out of sixteen, so it was kind of middle-of-the-road after the first round.

"I got going in the heat race, had a nice battle with Kevin Varnes. He and I traded the front spot a couple of times early on, then he pulled out a little gap. Then I think the track kind of came to me, and I was able to run him back down and get by him at the halfway point and put a little distance on him. So, we were where we wanted to be for the main event, which was the front row. I hadn't been on the front row for a couple of years, so that was a nice change. With us being second fastest and (Jake) Johnson on the pole, I knew I had to get out front and hope that (Johnson) didn't get a great start.

"That - exactly - happened. But, he was able to get out front - he was absolutely flying, he was on rails, and his bike was working good. He was riding well. He came by me about lap five, and I gave chasse the best I could for a while, but it was kind of a futile effort on my part, so I ended up dropping back into a battle with (Henry) Wiles and that was a good one. He rode really good, despite the fact that he didn't have any brakes. We came out of there with a second-place finish. That's three spots better than we were a year ago, so we're on target to chase the championship again and things are looking good going into the rest of the year."


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