Morgan Lucas Racing
Meet the Team
Subscribe to the Morgan Lucas Racing Press Feed!
Mon, June 2nd 2008
Another exasperating weekend, Sports Fans.
There wasn’t too much in the way of drama for Morgan or J.R. in qualifying since, with only 15 entries, everybody who showed up was going to make the field. But you certainly would like to qualify as near to the top as possible to bring a little attitude to eliminations. J.R. was ninth quickest at the end of the day on Saturday while Morgan was fourteenth. Not scintillating but at least they were going to be in the mix on Sunday.
Here’s the big issue right now. Both of those guys are fighting for their lives to make the Countdown. Morgan is 11th and J.R. is 12th. There are nine more races before the door shuts on the Countdown top ten and the ten drivers who hold spots right now aren’t about to roll over and give away their place in line.
So, when J.R. lost to his buddy Brandon Bernstein in the first round on Sunday and Morgan only got as far as Round 2 where he lost to Hillary Will—who went on to win the event—it didn’t significantly help their chances of moving in to where they need to be.
It was interesting to watch how similar the two cars ran in qualifying. They both had trouble in the first session on Friday, both made strong runs in the second session, fairly decent passes in Saturday’s first try, and then slipped a little in the final session. Could this be an indication of the teams sharing data and putting similar setups into both cars? I’d have to say that’s a reasonable explanation.
There was about 8/100 difference in their elapsed times in the first round of eliminations, and it was rather ironic that J.R’s 4.66 wasn’t able to get him past Brandon but Morgan’s slower 4.74 was enough to take out “Hot Rod” Fuller. That’s how things happen to shake out in this crazy sport. The job at hand right now is for both teams to begin knocking down round wins and not falling any further back in the standings between now and Indy.
On another note, I feel a little like a clairvoyant after seeing Hillary Will win on Sunday. Last week, I wrote a story for ESPN.com entitled, “Will Hillary Be Next?” and sure enough, she picked up her first career Top Fuel win on Sunday in her second career final round appearance. The whole crux of the story was the obvious emergence of female winners in the entire motorsports world in the past month or so. From Danica Patrick’s IRL victory in Japan in April, to young Simona Desilvestro’s first career win the Cooper Tire Atlantic Championship race in Long Beach that same weekend, to Ashley Force’s first winner’s circle in Atlanta a few weeks ago followed by Melanie Troxel’s first Funny Car trophy two weeks ago in Bristol,it seemed almost predestined that Hillary was on the verge of her first POWERade event title.
Back to the Lucas Oil boys.
The upside to their current predicament is that time hasn’t run out on them yet, the next race is at a real performance paradise and on average, both Morgan and J.R. got down the tricky track in Topeka this past weekend on nearly every run. They were both in the game, and certainly in better shape than they were earlier in the season when J.R. was blowing up stuff left and right and Morgan couldn’t catch a single lucky break. Things aren’t exactly rosey just yet but now you can more easily convince yourself that both these guys are on the threshold of some more successful race days in the near future. Maybe the worst is over.
Let’s take a trip to Route 66.