When the team arrived at the track on Friday afternoon, they found a very uniquely shaped race track. Rather than being an oval like most short tracks, Concord was a triangular shaped track with a "dog-leg" back straight. Soon after the team finished unloading the rig, the Pro Late Models were called out for practice. The first practice, Buggy Pletcher (Dave's son) would help guide Austin on what the right line was for the track. About 5 laps into the session, Austin pulled the car back in because of a bad vibration coming from the drive shaft. The new transmission that was put in the car earlier in the week required a different sized yoke, and the parts supplier sent the wrong one. One of Austin's competitors (and eventual race winner) Colt James was kind enough to let Austin and the team borrow one of their drive shafts, which would end up just being a quick-fix solution.
On Saturday morning, the team had the track all to them selves for 2 hours. For these 2 hours, Austin and the crew dialed in the car's setup. Austin would run some pretty quick times and the rest of the day looked pretty promising.
At 3:30 pm, open practice started and the car would handle the same, but due to the increasing heat, would slow down a few tenths. The fastest qualifying time for the weekend before was a 15.9, and Austin was running 16.5s. The crew made a few more small adjustments and hoped the new tires would make the difference.
Austin was the 4th car out to qualify. At that time, the pole was a 16.3. On the first lap, Austin drove a great lap and went a 16.076. He picked it up even more on his second lap, resulting in a 16.025 lap time. This time would look as if it would get AK Motorsports its second pole of the season, but a car that went out later in qualifying barely topped the lap time posted by the #11 Sonny's BBQ Ford Fusion. Even though Austin ran the 2nd fastest time in qualifying, he would have to start 6th due to the pill draw.
At the wave of the green flag, Austin would quickly realize that he was going to be at a disadvantage on all of the restarts. The new transmission that the team elected to run only had 2 gears, with the ratio between 1st and 2nd gear being relatively large, making shifting on the restarts pointless. On the start, Austin would get shuffled back to about 8th position. He would quickly charge back up into the top 5 before a caution would come out. Austin would lose 2 spots on the ensuing restart which would put him back in 6th. Austin was able to drive his way up to 4th when the 1st and 2nd place cars made contact. The 2nd place car got loose, the 3rd place car had to slow up, and Austin passed both of them on the outside. Crew chief Dave Pletcher told Austin to drive conservatively to save his tires and wait until the last 10 laps. Another caution came out on about lap 60, and the transmission caused Austin to once again lose positions on the restart. He was able to fight his way back to 2nd. A late race caution came out from a wreck towards the back of the field, and Austin lost one more position on the restart. He wasn't able to get back by the car that passed him on the start, so Austin and the team wound up with a solid 3rd place finish. After the race, Austin said "Those restarts were killing me. I had to pass the same cars quite a few times. More importantly though, we learned a lot about the setup for this track, I was able to get some valuable track time, and we should feel pretty good about how we should do at this upcoming ASA race. This is a really fun track, and I can't wait to come back here in 2 weeks." Austin also added that he would like to thank his crew: Dad, Dave, Ronnie, Ryan, and he would also like to thank Buggy Pletcher for coming out and helping.
Click on thumbnail image for larger picture
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
