Bad Day in California Sun

By Jason Jarrett

Nothing notable really happened at Michigan and I did not really feel like just making something up so I waited until this week to make another entry.

This week I want to hit on a few things that have come to mind. The trip to Sonoma and Infenion Raceway was my first but it was a good trip. The race track, from what I understand, has been improved from the fan’s viewpoint and from the team’s perspective. There was nothing that really nothing that stood out in my mind on that other than it seemed like the fans could see most of the track. I was surprised that the spotters could see as much as we could see. The only major place that we could not see was coming out of turn 11. We did have someone to help with that section of the track during the race.

As everyone knows by now, DJ did not have a good day. Their pit strategy was good and it looked as if they were going to gain some spots once everyone made their last stops for fuel. The events that followed really ruined the day for the 88 team. As DJ left the pits and entered turn two the car spun. He may have had some help but when I reviewed the race on TiVo I could not find a replay of that spin. This spin caused them to loose a ton of track position, any track position that might have been gained by the last stop.

There were a few close calls all day long but the last one was more than close. He was racing a in a pack of cars that were really going at it and racing extremely hard. It seemed like that is the way the day started and it stayed that way somewhere on the track all day. Like I said before, this was my first trip to this track, but I don’t really remember watching a race on Television, at Sonoma, that had so much contact. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are incidents every week that happen and never get on TV, but this seemed more than normal for Sonoma. The place looked really hard to pass on and a lot of the cars were equal so it made it more difficult to make clean passes. The final incident occurred toward the end of the race in the uphill right hander that takes the cars on a couple of elevation changes. That spot had many spins throughout the weekend. The group of cars entered in single file so I turned my attention to the next right hander to be prepared for anything that might happen ahead of where DJ was running. I saw nothing happening up there yet and as I turned my focus back to the 88 car I saw that he was already into the car in front of him and then piling into another car that was spinning because of contact. This was a very hard hit to dad but as I talked with him later he mentioned that when he ran into the car in front of him the throttle was hung wide open, causing him to hit the next car in front of him even harder. That was the end of his day!

I have felt comfortable about the spotting thing from day 1, but this weekend presented the biggest challenge so far, probably because I have spotted on every other type of track except a road course. I definitely got my lesson on a new type of track this weekend. As I looked back and saw him piling into those cars, I felt terrible, and felt like I missed something really big or something that could have been avoided. I could tell in the crew chief’s voice that he was thinking the same way. Well, we don’t have a replay system on the spotter’s stand so I worried about this all the way home. I kept asking the question to myself, "Did I miss something?" or "Could I have prevented this accident?" As I worried on the way home, I kept replaying what I remember over and over again, thinking that someone had seen something that I missed.

When I made it home, around 2 A.M. on Monday morning I immediately turned on my TiVo to watch the replay. I replayed it for about a half an hour, over and over again. I came to the conclusion that no matter if I had been looking right at him there was not much I could have done to totally prevent this accident from happening. That wreck happened fast! All I could have done was tell him that they were wrecking directly in front of him, but I don’t think the end result would have been different.

I know from my own racing career and from racing with guys with much less experience that sometimes things happen that people will never understand unless you are in the car at that particular moment. There are even times that I watch replays and say, "What was that driver thinking?" The reality of it is, until you are the one sitting in that car at that particular moment you don’t know how to react. Each situation is different and when you are a driver, you have one chance to react to a situation in front of you, no matter what the people in your ear are telling you. I knew this before but I see it every week now from a different perspective.

We will move on to Daytona and see if DJ can work some of his restrictor plate magic.

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