Click on the date below for that evening’s qualifying and finishing order.

 

 

September 27, 2003

To finish first, you must first finish (9/27/03) – Click here to see qualifying and finishing order.

It was an incredible end to the season at ODS.

We ran at Southside Speedway on Friday night as sort of a tune up for the last race at ODS on Saturday-- and the car was undriveable.   We spun four or five times in practice in a car that just wasn't turning at the technical 3/10's mile, mostly flat oval. We qualified next-to-last and finished just a bit higher. After the race we talked to Kevin Yeatts who had setup our car to such good effect this season and he suggested that we run over to his place after the race and check it. We got to Kevin's at 12:30am and worked until 3:30am fixing the hidden damage from the last race where we'd hit a stalled Rick Bowman (#911) in turn 3 at ODS. We loaded up and drove another 3 hours to roll into the Mad Cow garage at 6:30am on race day. Dave (crew chief) and Bill got in at the race shop (Will's garage) at around 9am or so to see a note detailing what else we had to do to get the car ready to race that day They got cracking and by the time the driver (Will) got out to the garage around 11:30, we were ready to rumble again. So with only a few hours of sleep and we finished up and headed to Old Dominion Speedway, sleep-deprived but hopeful.

Now, we'd led the Master's division for most of the year at Old Dominion Speedway until a rising Rick Losh passed us later in the season, and we'd entered the last race of the season trailing by 26 points. This would prove to be important later, as we should have had 4 more points as we'd been mis-scored in the first two races, dropping us a position in each race.

So when we qualified a distant 21st in a field of 30, and saw Losh in the top 10, we knew we had a tough job ahead of us.  To make things worse, when a car that had qualified ahead of us decided not to run, the lineup was mishandled and we were not able to actually move up correctly, being put in the wrong lane at a track where the starting lane (inside or outside) is important.  When we finally did start after an interminable wait, we hooked up behind Chad Pieper (#22) and charged forward, gaining several positions from good passes until the third lap when the first of 3 major crashes happened- and one of the unlucky crashes was Rick Losh, the driver we were chasing for the Master's division. He went agricultural coming out of turn 2 when he slowed for another wreck in front of him, careened through the muddy infield (spraying the Mad Cow racer and driver) and crashed into the guardrail. He and several others were out very early. We avoided this crash and steadily moved up in the field, sometimes from real passes but many from attrition of cars ahead of us.  Mid-race we had a tussle with Duncan Molesworth (#53), got sloppy and let him by, but he was eventually black-flagged for a dragging bumper which put paid to his race effort, though he did return to finish the race. By that time the Mad Cow racer had gotten up to around 15th place before the race was red-flagged for a crash with the tracks most illustrious perennial crasher and when the race was restarted at lap 20, we thought we had a 10-lap shootout- until another crash lost another 5 laps to cautions, which setup the final 5 laps shootout, which lasted for about 500 feet when Roger Austin Jr went outside to pass in 1 and either got nudged and wrecked or just got on the marbles and wrecked (depending on who the witness was). In any case, he was well and truly wrecked and the race was restarted for the last time.  We had worked our way up to 10th at that point and were expecting to finish there- but we soon passed the #06 car of Sean Dawson who was going uncharacteristically slowly (we later learned he had a broken axle, probably from the wreck with Roger Austin, Jr) and right near the end, we passed another car that had been near the sharp end of the grid all race, JD Trenary (#73) after he began to shed parts from his racer. The race finished with a red/checker combo for the loose parts on the track (we thing that was the reason) while we were challenging the #28 car for seventh.

So we ended up in 8th place, an incredible finish given another one of our patented poor qualifying efforts.  Part of racing on short-tracks is avoiding wrecks and the Mad Cow team knew going in they had to stay out of the carnage that the last race of the season always seems to bring.  We had great spotting with our new radio system which helped us avoid coming into a turn blind where there were stalled racers littering the racing line.  This race we even hung back a bit in situations where we thought there was likely to be a clash right ahead so we'd have more room to maneuver. We tried to race conservatively this time and it paid off, though we weren't cutting consistently fast race laps- in the race were doing low 18s and high 17s, while in practice we'd cut 17.60s (a time that would have placed us much higher on the grid by the way). 

After the race, we weren't sure where the track had scored Losh so when the race order was published we both ran to the trailer and began calculating points.  The verdict: Lost had gained 10 points based on a 21st finishing position, and we had gained 36 points, based on 8th place. You can do the math- it was a tie, with both drivers totaling 182 points to finish the season. Both the Mad Cow Motorsports team and Rick Losh's Kenwood Motorsports team drivers raced very hard indeed the entire season. Both had some good luck and some bad luck. To finish in a dead tie at the end of the season is amazing, indeed.  It truly was an incredible finish for the entire Mad Cow Motorsports team (who are listed on the home page for your convenience).  We had a great run for a new team with a rookie driver!  Next year we may add another car to the mix (look for another Mad Cow entry with a reverse paint scheme!) and we will probably run more races next year, in addition to the tweaking we try to do every year.

Congratulations to both teams- and I suspect that there may be a rematch soon at the Asphalt Nationals at Southern National Speedway this month!  We plan to go to SNS for the nationals, mostly for the fun and camaraderie - and we may even surprise ourselves when we stack our 1-year old team against the best in the nation.

See you there!

-Will Campbell