With the season almost complete, wet weather visited Wampum PA forcing the competitors to bring out the rain tires. Everyone scrambled to change tires and chassis setups for the impending weather early Saturday morning. Although this weather can make the day miserable for the crew (me), Grant was all smiles. He has qualified on pole in all of the rain races he has entered and was very confident he would perform well with the slick track. Rain racing has become his favorite.
Track conditions stayed consistent throughout the day, constant rain. Even though I was soaked, at least I wasn’t feverishly wrenching to chase track conditions. We ran our full wet setup the whole day. The first two practice sessions went better than expected and Grant was the fastest kart in his practice group by a large margin, even with higher powered karts mixed in the group. Grant qualified on pole with greater than 1/2 second on the second place kart.
The heat race went as planned and Grant finished first, placing him on pole for the feature. Grant, at this point, was certainly fast enough to win the feature but he would need to break away early to make it happen. The kart that was sitting second knew this and put a great pass on Grant running in to turn 4 of the very first lap. Knowing that the race had just started I wasn’t concerned about the pass. There would be plenty of time to regain the position. In fact, as the field disappeared into the back section of the track, I expected to see Grant in the lead as the group returned to view. This would not be the case, in fact he was no where to be seen as the entire field headed to the long straight away. As it turned out, the kart in front of Grant broke a lot earlier than he was expecting and to miss the driver Grant went into the wet grass. Sitting there on the sideline he could do nothing but watch until every kart in the field drove past giving him clear track to reenter the race. At the time I thought, “Oh well, we did pretty good today in spite of where we are going to finish.” Grant on the other hand wasn’t thinking of this at all. He focused on each driver in front of him and passed them as if he was on a dry track while they were on the wet track. In only a nine lap race he was able to take a second place finish after passing 10 other drivers. Although he didn’t win, it was probably one of his best performances to date.