Frustrating Race for
Gordon at Mansfield
(September
4, 2007) - DuBois, PA. The results from the Charlie
Campbell Memorial Sears Auto Center 250 race at Mansfield were not
quite what Benny Gordon hoped they would be. Benny’s previous
performance at Mansfield has been very good with three wins, four
top-5s, five top-10s and two poles in seven races. With that record,
he set his sights high for a win Saturday night. However, Saturday
turned out to be a very frustrating day and it was quite different
from Friday’s practice. On Friday, Benny and a core group of the
North South Motorsports team spent the day working on race day
setup. Running over 90 practice laps, working extremely hard
tweaking the setup and as crewmember Todd Smith said, “a million
shock and spring changes later” the team was able to make solid
gains and dialed the car in to be consistent and fast. The only car
faster for the day was the 81 car of Mark McFarland. The day had
gone smoothly and confidence was high for a strong showing in the
race.
However, the car unloaded on Saturday proved to be nothing like the
car put in the hauler on Friday evening. “Right off the rip in the
first few laps Saturday the car just did not have the feel or the
speed that we had Friday afternoon,” said Benny. “If I had not been
driving it both days I would have never believed how different it
was handling.” As a result, the entire two-hour practice Saturday
was spent searching for the speed that disappeared overnight.
“I have no idea what happened to the car since yesterday,” said
Benny. “Not only was our speed and handling off, we just were not
working smoothly as a team during the practice session in the pits.”
Over three quarters of the practice was spent sitting on pit road
making changes to the chassis searching for the right combination.
Frustration was running high. After consulting the notes from
previous race setups for Mansfield, Benny decided to make wholesale
changes to the car following practice putting it back to the set- up
from the race shop. ‘”I knew that it was proven setup and would get
me close enough too where we could adjust on it during the race,”
said Benny.
The qualifying effort was going to be similar to tossing dice. Benny
was not sure which car was going to “show up” for the session, the
fast one from Friday or the slower one from earlier in the day.
Benny was able to finesse the car and qualify the Samuel Metals,
Johnny’s Suzuki, ADG, Predator Performance, Murray’s Freightliner
Ford Fusion into the eighth starting position. The changes made to
the car following practice made it better, but not great. The
frustrations continued to run high.
The race turned out to be a combination of short burst of laps at
race speed followed by frequent periods of caution laps. There were
20 cautions, one red flag and over 110 laps of caution during the
race. “We had very little opportunity to get the car up to speed and
keep it there,” said Benny. “The tires never had the chance to come
in for us because of the caution laps. I am sure we could have
advanced on the field if we had the long green runs we needed. I do
not know what the problem was tonight with all of the wrecks. We do
not normally have problems like this even on narrow groove
racetracks. There were way too many caution laps during this race.
This was a tough day from start to finish.”
On a positive note for all the frustrations of the day, Benny
notched another top five finish in the race and the car survived
with just a few new rubs and scrapes to show for the evening’s
effort. “I am glad to come out of here with a car in one piece, said
Benny. “There are a lot of cars that were torn up and those guys
have lots of hard work ahead of them to get ready for Iowa.”
About Samuel
The Samuel Company is a family owned metal processing and
distributing company headquartered in Ontario, Canada with more than
80 facilities located throughout Canada and the United States and
more than 4500 employees. For more information about Samuel,
please visit www.samuel.com.
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