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April 30, 2006
Hey, There Was a Truck Race Last Night!
Not that anyone noticed since it was in St. Louis instead of taking place at the same track that the Cup and Busch races are being run at. Steve Park finished 18th and a top twenty is something for this team to get excited about considering how poor their results in all the other races this season have been. Of course that's not been the fault of the team or their drivers, rather a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which has resulted in being wrecked out of the first four races of the season. Last night's race was a different story - despite spinning twice, as usual though no fault of his own, rather because of other drivers getting into him, Steve finished the race in one piece, which I'm sure the team was very happy about since bent sheet metal is probably more of a burden to a small team than it is for a team with a lot of resources.
However, the 18th place finish was more due to a lot of other drivers being involved in incidents and having problems than the #59 truck being so great. It seemed as if Steve's truck was loose at times and the only reason why he was towards the front at all was due to pit strategy. Unfortunately all too often after he made some gains on the track, he almost immediately would fall backwards. Last race there was a pre-race report but there was no post-race report and there wasn't a pre-race report for this race so I'm not sure the odds are very good that we will ever find out what went on for Steve during the race unless a fan posts a race report of their own somewhere. I had figured that finishing 18th might bump the #59 team up a little in the owner's points standings so that they were closer to being in the top 30 and thus not have to worry about qualifying on time but it appears that they are exactly where they were prior to this race.
Todd Bodine ended up winning this race, his third win this season, and fifth out of the last eight races. At this point Bodine is completely dominating this series and has to be considered a threat to win just about every race. He said,
"It's just a really great place to be. I still feel like I want to get in the Cup Series and prove that we can do it there. But right now we're enjoying what we're doing. We're running good and we're going after a championship for Toyota."
Bodine has never had much success in Cup and has seemed to attract quite a bit of trouble on the track. But maybe he's just never raced cars that would allow him to be as competitive as he's been in the truck series lately. I think there's a good chance that he will be the next Truck Series Champion. Even if he doesn't win it all this season, I think he will continue to show that he isn't as useless of a driver as many fans seem to think.
The Toyotas dominated this race. The top five was Bodine, his teammate, Ted Musgrave; David Reutimann, who led quite a few laps himself in this race; Jack Sprague; and Johnny Benson. In addition, David Starr finished 8th so six of the top ten finishers in this race were Toyota trucks. Bodine said,
"There is no competitive advantage. Where the advantage is is for the support that Toyota puts behind their teams, in the technical side of it -- getting us the information, the data, the means to do what we do every week."
Despite what he's saying I think the Toyotas do have somewhat of a competitive advantage over many of the other teams. They are just so strong and this race is some of the proof of that.
Otherwise, I can't say that I was all that excited about this race. It's funny because I was really looking forward to seeing Steve race since it had been three weeks since the last time he was on the track and that race didn't end so well. But I guess because he didn't have such an exceptional race I found myself feeling kind of blah about this race. I've been noticing lately that the interest level in what Steve is up to seems to have waned so maybe I'm not the only one who is blah about things. It's not that no one cares about Steve - Steve has a ton of fans, who will support him always no matter what he's doing but I guess because there's not that much to talk about, even when he races, people aren't.... well, talking. I guess this is the way things evolve. Maybe that will change when he has a full-time ride for people to get excited about or when the fanzone opens.
Posted by silverdsl at April 30, 2006 06:15 PM