When the team got to River Cities Speedway Friday morning, their work wasn’t over. Garber said on race day the team will go over all of the nuts and bolts – torquing them to make sure nothing falls off.
The tedious work resulted in Schuchart and his team claiming another win. However, an unknown oil leak plagued Allen’s night at River Cities Speedway, resulting in a 24th-place finish.
The team didn’t have a week to diagnose the issue, though. They were racing the next night at Granite City Speedway in Minnesota – about four and a half hours away from Grand Forks.
With the team’s large toter and trailer, the trip is about six hours, according to Schuchart.
By 11:30 a.m. – close to 12 hours after the end of Friday night’s race – the two Shark Racing cars were rolled out of the trailer in the Granite City Speedway pit area. Schuchart’s No. 1s car stayed untouched most of the morning.
“You make sure everything is working the way it needs to,” Schuchart said. “Other than that, it’s changing your set up from track to track and the little things you might change.”
For Allen’s team, they started the morning investigation the No. 1a’s engine. A half hour later, they began the process of removing it from the car. After another 30 minutes, a different engine had been installed.
About five hours before the 7:30 p.m. start, both cars were ready for another night of racing.
The quick turnaround in maintenance can create extra nerves, Garber said.
“Obviously, you don’t get to go over it as much as you’d like during the week,” he said. “There is a little more of a possibility of something going wrong. That’s why we try to do the best we can during the week to make sure everything is good so we can go two nights without having any issues.”
At the conclusion of the Granite City Speedway race, Schuchart finished third – building on the consistency he is looking for with his team – and Allen rebounded to a 13th-place finish.
“We’re very lucky to have guys that work really hard for us,” Schuchart said. “But when you have new guys that come around, they think this deal is race on the weekend and party during the week and it’s definitely not that way. We get our fair share of fun and get to do some fun stuff and meet a lot of cool people, but there’s a lot of work that goes into these things.
“If we’re not working on them, we’re usually traveling. Sometimes you get where we’re not racing during the week, it might take us two or three days to get ready and then we get a day or two off. That’s definitely nice. Other than that, your days off are driving down the road.”
From Minnesota, they had the five-hour drive to Knoxville Raceway in Knoxville, Iowa for the Friday, June 14, and Saturday, June 15 races at the half-mile, black-dirt oval.
On Monday, in the camping area of Knoxville Raceway’s facility, the No. 1a and No. 1s Shark Racing cars were once again backed out of the trailer for another week of maintenance.
“It’s a never-ending cycle,” noted Schuchart.