Joanides Bounces to 9th Place Finish at Mesa

  Nick Joanides and the Colorfast, Jackson Race Cars Monte Carlo had high hopes for Mesa Marin based on past performances. Off the trailer, the car was very twitchy in practice and Nick was at the bottom of the speed charts. The team made change after change and as is always the case, crew chiefs Tony and Dave Jackson continued to make the car better as the lap times continued to improve. They were not able to test one last change as practice had ended before they could return to the track and Nick only ended up 18th on the practice sheet. After much consideration based on the handling of the car, more changes were made and the Jackson's did an awesome job as Nick really picked it up in qualifying and posted the third quickest time in qualifying. Unfortunately with the new rules in the Southwest Series, the field is inverted at all short tracks and with the invert, Nick was relegated back to an 8th place starting position.

Being a warm day, Nick planned to save the car in the early stages of the race. At the drop of the green flag, Nick fell into the 9th position and rode there for the first 30 laps.  After a caution, Nick was tapped in the rear quarterpanel and had to chase the car up the track and well out of the groove, dropping him back to the 15th position. Over the next 100 or so laps, Nick patiently moved forward and by lap 130, had moved up to the 6th position. A caution around lap 133, slowed the field. On the restart, a lapped car slid up right in front of Nick, forcing him to move high to avoid contact and again out of the groove, which was very costly as it dropped him back to the 14th position with just 12 laps remaining. Nick did manage to move back up and finish in the 9th position.

"That was just a rough race and everyone was bouncing off of each other. Every time we passed someone on the outside, the cars down low, slid up into us, I must have 10 doughnuts on the left side of the car. It wasn't the result we had hoped for, but the team performed awesome and it was just race circumstances that hurt us, but we'll take the top 10 and move on to the next race", Joanides commented.