“Right now, all I care about is this Coors Light.”
That came from a jubilant Gio Scelzi, kicking off a celebration born from winning the Wednesday night Knoxville Nationals preliminary feature and scoring high points honors but most everyone else was left drinking out of frustration.
It was a strange night and even stranger race track that left both David Gravel and Donny Schatz preparing for a date with Hard Knox Night on Friday at the Marion County Fairgrounds. In other words, two of the expected contenders are at risk of missing the main event, or at best, starting from the back of the feature on Saturday night.
So, what happened?
It started with time trials and a track that lost speed quickly and created a disadvantage for everyone who went out late. Matt Juhl was the first driver to turn his laps and that quick time lasted the duration of the session. There were just four drivers who went out after 30 of 52 and posted a top-10 lap and only Sheldon Haudenshild broke the top-10 from the 35th draw.
The track was slimy around a narrow bottom and fast around the top until the bottom came in which made the top less viable come the races.
Again, just a weird track.
Schatz posted just the 38th fastest time but inverted to the pole of his heat, which he won, but still left a ton of points on the table due to the misfortune of time trials.
Gravel posted a top-10 lap in time trials but just couldn’t pass during his early heat and needed to full send it into the final corner of the B Main just to even qualify for the prelim feature. He finished 15th and is likely stuck coming from Saturday’s B-Main.
“You can’t blame it all on luck, right,” Gravel said. “I feel we did good in qualifying when we went out and with the heat race it would have been better going out in the fourth or fifth heat, and then starting seventh, I would have rather started eighth or sixth but I was ninth going into Turn 1 on the outside because the outside lane got going better, and it was still greasy on the bottom.
“From there, it was just an uphill battle. We clawed to sixth and in a perfect world we could have maybe ran sixth … In the feature, I maybe could have ran 11th or 12th probably. During the caution, I was 16th, but I about crashed (with Schatz) one lap and then missed the bottom two laps in a row and two or three guys got back by me and just needed to claw back to get to 15th.
“That’s just part of the Knoxville Nationals. It’s not easy. I’ve been really fortunate to qualify good and transfer into the heat and tonight it didn’t happen. It’s the Nationals and all the best cars are here and it was an uncharacteristic track, I feel, because the bottom was too greasy early so you had to run the top in 1 and 2 and once that bottom tapped up, that was the place to be and that took the top out of play.”
Out of the top-20 in qualifying, only six of them transferred into the feature from the heat races with the top-six in time trials all forced to run the B-Main. Sheldon Haudenschild was seventh in time trials and was able to race from seventh to fourth from Heat Two, doing something a lot of his peers couldn’t, and leaving him feeling pretty proud too.
“That’s the easiest Nationals (prelim) I’ve experienced since I’ve been doing this,” Haudenschild said. “Obviously, not as good as I wanted to be in the feature but I’ll take it, for sure, because our qualifying effort was as good as I’ve been here and the heat effort was really good as well. A lot of positives to take away from it and it’s the best I’ve ever felt here.”
He could only muster a 12th place run in the main event but a podium might have even given him a shot at the overall pole on Saturday.
Brent Marks had a really good night too, going 15th in time trials, advanced through the heat and ran fifth in the feature and is fifth in points awaitin whatever happens on Thursday.
He’s more likely than not in the show and was one of the few guys who said the track was enjoyable.
“Well, this year seems to be different because the track has been different this year,” Marks said. “I know the local guys have been struggling with it a little bit and when we raced here in June, it was different than what I thought it usually would be.
“Sunday, it was different for the Cappy, and tonight, I felt like it was more or less Knoxville and what we kind of expect here.
“You could really move around the racetrack and find multiple grooves and it was great. So I felt like they did a great job.”
That isn’t the consensum feeling around the pit area.
“But we also came in tonight sort of blind in a way,” Marks said. “We thought it was going to go one direction and it caight us off guard but we did a good job reacting to it and I’m looking forward to Saturday.”
And so is Scelzi.
“The track is going to be different,” he said. “We’ll have to watch the track prep before the feature and see how slick it gets. It’s not going to be super hot which is good for the race track. I was surprised the track was that wet tonight. I felt like it got wetter and all the crumbs on the bottom got thrown up to the middle. It made the bottom easier to run, which was good for me, but Saturday will be a different race track so no sense in thinking about it now.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
