BORENSTEIN RACING CONTINUES POSTING NEW HIGHS!

The Borenstein racing team has continued to improve every week through the strength of hard work from the team. Jackson Race cars has worked extremely hard to improve the chassis set up every week and the results have been good. Saturday however, the team proved that the old saying “it’s better to be lucky than good” is a very true statement.

Jackson Race Cars made significant changes to the suspension during the off week and the changes paid off as driver Nick Joanides indicated the car was the best it had ever been in Friday night testing. On Saturday, the team continued to show their strength in qualifying, equaling their best qualifying effort of the season with a 4^th place run. The car did however develop a tight condition, which Nick felt prevented him from a pole winning run.

The team made changes to the chassis prior to the main event which they hoped would free up the car. Unfortunately, from the drop of the green flag, Nick realized something was seriously wrong with the car. The car was very unbalanced and the front tires had virtually no grip. It was so bad at one point, Nick thought that a tire had gone down. A few laps later, something was dragging from the car, grinding the race track and throwing sparks. What ever was dragging eventually worked itself free several laps later. The team has not yet had a chance to go over the car, but are under the assumption that the piece that was grinding the race track is likely to be a broken part that caused the ill-handling of the car. The team will certainly give the car a thorough inspection this week to find the problem.

After the pre-race invert of 8 was pulled, Nick started in the fifth position. With the car being so ill-handling, he had dropped to the 13^th position in just 10 laps. By lap 18, he had climbed back up to the 12^th position when the luck factor kicked in. Two cars running in the top five got together, setting off a ten car accident in which all five cars running directly in front of Nick were collected as were the 5 cars running directly behind him. With cars littered all across the track, Nick somehow managed to zigzag his way through and of all the cars running from 7^th through 17^th, was the only one to get through without a scratch.

After the accident was cleaned up, the race resumed with Nick back up to the 7^th position. With the car still not handling well, he tried his best just to hold his position and he did just that, taking the white flag still in the 7^th position. Saturday was Nicks birthday and on the final lap, he got an unexpected gift. Heading into the final turn on the last lap, the cars running in the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th positions got together and all spun, Nick avoided all three and crossed the line in the 4^th position.

“Jackson Race Cars has done a great job with the car and it was awesome in testing, but I assume something must have broken for it to get that bad and the fact that something was dragging the race track supports that assumption. We definitely got lucky to get such a good finish, but we’ll gladly take it. We had some bad luck at the start of the season, so this one helps balance that out a little. We had a problem tonight, but the bright side is that the car was great in practice and qualifying and once we fix what ever it is that broke, I know we’ll come back at the next race with a great chance to improve on our best finish yet again” said Joanides.

With their third consecutive finish of 7th or better, the team has posted the third highest average finish of any team over the past three races, vaulting them from 21st to 8th in the point standings.

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