LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. — To say that Saturday’s Indiana Midget Week round at Lawrenceburg Speedway was a rough one for the Reinbold/Undewood Motorsports team would be a massive understatement.
The team endured three flips during the course of the program at the three-eighths-mile dirt oval, including two by Texas teenager Chase Randall during a span of 10 minutes during the 30-lap feature.
It was a costly night that ended with two destroyed race cars, something that team co-owner Andy Reinbold was admittedly frustrated by at the end of the night.
“It has definitely been a while since we had a night like this,” Reinbold admitted. “I’m really just concerned about Chase’s deal. He had just started setting the car and addressing the corner, and it just snapped and rolled instantaneously. It peeled the tail tank off it immediately and, obviously, he got some big airtime there.
“Thank God he’s alright because it looked and could have been a lot worse than it was.”
The chaos began on lap six of the B main Saturday, when Hayden Reinbold — Andy’s son — tagged the outside wall in turn four on corner exit, sending his No. 19az into a wild series of barrel rolls on the main straightaway.
Hayden Reinbold’s car careened nearly the length of the frontstretch, coming to rest beyond the flagstand and briefly caught fire before the flames extinguished themselves.
To his credit, the younger Reinbold quickly clambered out of his race car with help from safety workers on the scene.
“I was just trying to get around the guy in front of me, went a little too high and jumped the cushion,” Hayden Reinbold recalled. “Once I got over it, I got a little squirrely and just caught the wall off the end of the corner. It was unlucky, not something that you ever want to have happen in that spot.
“It was probably the wildest flip that I’ve had in racing,” Reinbold added. “I flipped two other times in a sprint car, including one that hurt me pretty bad, but the midget [flip] wasn’t actually that bad.”
Hayden Reinbold’s teammate, Chase Randall, won the B-main but had his own harrowing plights during the feature.
Randall’s misfortune began with nine laps left in the main, when he softly got upside down in turn four but was able to continue. It was a harbinger of things to come, however.
Two laps after the restart, an apparent parts failure sent Randall’s No. 19a skyward, as his Bush’s Chicken-sponsored car got as high as the top of the turn-three catchfence before free-falling back to earth.
The car’s impact with the track surface on landing was enough to dislodge the fuel tank from the rear of the frame. Randall slowly exited the car under his own power.
Following a flip from the Friday night program at Bloomington Speedway, it marked Randall’s third time getting wheels-up during Indiana Midget Week — nearly half of the seven total flips so far.
Randall will take Sunday night at Tri-State Speedway in Haubstadt, Ind., off to rest up before, hopefully, returning to action on June 9 at Circle City Raceway near Indianapolis.
Andy Reinbold said the team would attempt to learn what it could from Randall’s mangled car in an effort to determine what caused it to begin flipping, but that he wasn’t expecting the process to be easy.
“We’ll definitely bring it back and look at it,” he noted. “It’s kind of difficult to tell what really caused it … if there was a failure or, on the whole, what exactly it was. I don’t think anybody really got a shot of it or had it on video, so it will be intriguing.
“I doubt we’ll ever figure it out, but definitely we’re going to try and do some research on it, for sure.”
With team leader and veteran Tanner Thorson only having finishes of 13th, sixth and 13th through three of the eight Indiana Midget Week races thus far, Reinbold knows his team has a lot of work ahead of it.
“We’ll fix things up and get back out there, but we’re not where we need to be now, by any means,” he said.