JOANIDES CHARGES FROM 40^TH TO 5^TH ONLY TO GET TAKEN OUT WITH 5 TO GO.

Nick Joanides and the Colorfast/Jackson Race Cars Monte Carlo had a nightmare of a weekend at Infineon Raceway. To start, Nascar apparently did not receive the team’s entry for the race and pitted them last in line, therefore instead of being teched in the top 20, they were last of 45 cars and did not complete Thursday’s tech until the next day, putting the team behind in getting out for practice.

Nick finally made it on the race track only to have the transmission stick in 4^th gear on his warm up lap. He came in and the team attempted to repair the transmission, but were not able to do so without pulling the transmission out and therefore did not get a single lap of practice in. Nick went out to qualify and had the same problem on his first lap going into turn 11. With the transmission stuck in 4^th gear in turn 11, which is a 1^st gear corner, Nick’s first lap was still just 2 seconds off of a top 10 speed in qualifying. The team however was forced to use a provisional. Still without a single complete lap on the race track, the team put in a new transmission before happy hour practice, hoping to finally get some laps on the car to determine the handling. The new transmission proved to be no better as this time on the warm up lap, the transmission stuck between 1^st and 2^nd gear. After another fix, the team was ready to start the main event in the 40^th position, still without a single complete lap on the race track. The Jackson’s used the base set up from Gail Chase’s #77 car and the team prayed for the best.

Starting 40^th on a road course, where passing is extremely difficult as there are really only one or two good passing spots, meant Nick had to be aggressive and patient at the same time. At this point, the team was just hoping to get a top 20 finish and come home in one piece. The green flag dropped and Nick’s awesome run began, far beyond the expectations of the team after the weekend they had. Nick passed 8 cars before the completion of lap 1 to move into the 32^nd position. When the first caution flew at lap 9, he had already passed 21 cars and was in the 19^th position. A couple of laps later, the track went green again, and Nick went back to work, moving into the top 10 on lap 18, when another car dumped oil through turn 4, causing several cars to spin, including Nick. Nick completed a 360 spin and got going in the 18^th position and started picking back up the spots he lost. At lap 26, the team made a green flag pit stop for left side tires and returned to the track in the 13^th position.

Although most teams took on 4 tires, Nick was still one of the fastest cars on the track with just the two tire change and had charged all the way up to the 4^th position by lap 40. For the next 19 laps, Nick hovered between the 4^th and 6^th positions, battling Jim Pettit, Craig Raudman and Burney Lamar.

With just five laps to go, it appeared that this nightmare weekend was going to have a happy ending, however on lap 59 of the 64 lap race, a car got to the inside of Nick coming off of turn 11. The two drag raced into turn one side by side. With the season of bad luck Nick has had, his main priority was to just finish this strong run, so he showed the other car a lot of respect and gave him plenty of room through the left handed turn one. Unfortunately, the other car did not show Nick the same respect in turn 1A. With Nick on the outside, the other car body slammed Nick off of the race track and essentially ended his day, as it resulted in heavy front end damage. “I am just completely disappointed” said Nick. “we had such a great top 5 run going with just 5 laps to go and I gave that guy a ton of room and showed him a lot of respect when I didn’t have to, only to have him blatantly take me out of the race”, Nick continued. “I’ve always believed in racing clean and racing people the way I want to be raced, but I guess I need to stop being such a nice guy on the race track, so I’ll just store this in my memory bank as I now know how he wants to race me!”

Regardless of the finish, the team was proud to overcome all of the adversity to pass 36 cars on the race track, far more than any other car had done, and they’ll move on to Madera and hope that they can turn this season of bad luck around.