Don Thomson Jr. and the Home Hardware Chevrolet team were winners in the first ever NASCAR Canadian Tire Series (NCATS) race at Cayuga Speedway last season. The team returned to the 5/8 mile track this past weekend to open the 2008 season ready to defend their title. What started out as a promising day turned into a frustrating night.
Under bright sunshine the Home Hardware Chevrolet under the guidance of Don Thomson Jr. was among the front runners during afternoon practice. The team continued to work on improvements to the car for the late afternoon qualifying session and their hard work succeeded. Thomson’s scorching qualifying run of 20.954 seconds works out to an average speed of 107.378mph, good enough for the pole position to begin the race.
Though he was obviously pleased with the best qualifying time of the day, the Home Hardware Chevy driver was still not completely satisfied with the cars performance and concerned about how the car would race. “Our car was pretty good, don’t get me wrong” said Thomson. “But I’m always looking for a little more. From what I was feeling in the car during practice I was concerned about how things would go during the race”.
As the 2008 racing season began with the drop of the green flag in the Crown Jewel 200 The Home Hardware Chevy drives concerns appeared to be for not. Thomson took control of the race on lap two and appeared to have things under control for the next 43 circuits. “We were okay at first but this track changes a lot as the sun goes down and it cools off” said Thomson. “We weren’t doing anything different but as the race went on the car didn’t handle as well and our performance started to fall off”.
The Home Hardware team would make their scheduled pit stop for fuel and tires and also try to improve the cars handling. “Unfortunately whatever we tried didn’t really work and we fell back a bit further into the field. When you get back in the pack and your car isn’t handling the way you want it gets pretty nasty” said the frustrated driver. “We got bumped around a little too and that certainly didn’t help out the car’s performance”.
The Home Hardware team soldiered on and also made a couple of late pit stops during caution periods trying to give the driver any handling assistance they could. The team would finish the race and unlucky thirteenth.
The 2008 NCATS schedule has expanded to thirteen events this year run on ovals, road courses and temporary street circuits across Canada. The next event will take place Saturday May 31st at the Autodrome St. Eustache. You can watch all thirteen races this season on TSN. For information about the NCATS including schedule, results and more, log onto www.nascar.ca
This release prepared by TL Sports & Entertainment
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