MACDONALD FINISHES FOURTEENTH AT GREENVILLE
The much anticipated K&N Pro Series East season opener took the green flag in the Kevin Whitaker Chevrolet 150 at Greenville Pickens Speedway after a week’s rain delay yet the outcome was not the anticipated one for Eddie MacDonald and the Grimm Racing Team. The series veteran fought a loose handling racecar for much of the race hanging on for the 14th spot when the checker flag flew.
“The car was so loose at the end, I felt like I was dirt-tracking in the turns. The car was really good early in the race and we were moving forward for the first forty laps but then it just kept getting worse,” said MacDonald after the race.
After running fifth in the first practice, the Rowley driver felt like the car would be good saying, “When we went out for the first practice everything felt great. We had speed and the car was turning well in the corners. We tried some different stuff in the second practice but we went back to our first set up for qualifying. We qualified tenth but it was the fastest lap we had turned there (20.857 sec. 86.302 mph) but we thought we would be good for the long run. It is a long race so we were just going to take it easy at first, take what we could get and save the tires for the end. It was a good plan but it didn’t turn out that way.”
When the green flag waved, the Grimm Racing Chevrolet immediately moved up two spots and by lap 50, MacDonald was riding in the sixth position when the car started losing grip. ” I was racing along with Gresham and Ranstrom for most of the laps but then the car started sliding out from under me in the corners. Those new teams from the south were so fast we started losing a lot of ground. It got so bad I was lucky to hold onto it. We just missed something. We thought we had a pretty good car after what we saw in the first practice and from what we had learned during our test day, so we were confident we would be there at the end of the race.”
Despite the ill-handling racecar, MacDonald rode in the ninth position with ten laps to go but just couldn’t hang on to the spot saying, “I was so loose in the turns the other guys just kept banging off me to get by. The only good thing about the night was the composite body came out of everything in pretty good shape. We really expected a lot more tonight than what we got. We built this car from the ground up and all the guys have worked really hard on it so it was disappointing to have the finish we did. We just have to move on to the next race at South Boston. We had a great test day there so hopefully we will have a much better finish.”
The K&N Pro Series East will travel to South Boston Speedway for the April 16 running of the South Boston 150. To visit the team websites go to eddiemacdonald.net and grimmracing.com.