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Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Just a little tap in the right rear bumper, caused by a driver who was perhaps a little angry at getting passed by a “slower” car in the first lap of our Sunday race. And what a great first lap we’d had! Long-time readers will recall that our engine blew up on the cool-down lap of May’s race at Putnam Park. With four weeks between races, we did just what you would have done: we procrastinated until the very last moment and then spent 72 hours in a state of utter panic, installing the engine only to find out that the timing was off 90 degrees, causing fuel to spray from the intake. Oh noes! But by Sunday we had the car kind of sorted out.

Come the qualifying session on Sunday, we had our rain tires on and were ready to rock… but the qualifying session turned out to be completely dry. Oops! That put us 11th of 14 drivers, which meant we had to boogie when the green flag flew. Boogie we did – up seven places before the first lap was completed. Unfortunately for us, one of those places was a Spec Focus. You kids know what that means, right? An attempt on my part to protect my line long enough to drop that sucker in the infamous Turn 13 made that Focus really angry, so he decided to put me in the wall. Let’s see what happens when you “bump and run” a poor little Neon at 90+ mph:

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Ah yes, the Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, really works wonders when you’re trying to whack somebody. We hit the wall hard. Unfortunately for the Focus, he was turning left into our bumper so hard that he forgot to unwind the steering when I obligingly spun away from him, and he drove right across the track into the concrete wall! It would appear that my karma ran over his dogma, or something like that.

We have video and more photos of the incident, and we’ll be bringing them to you for your amusement as soon as everybody settles down a bit. The bad news? Our car’s dead, gone, totaled. The frame’s twisted and the roof is buckled inside. But in the famous words of Starship, nothing’s gonna stop us now. We’re building a new Neon from the ground up for the August Mid-Ohio race. Our crew is donating hundreds of volunteer hours to the cause. We’ll keep you posted on the build this month.

Oh yeah, if anybody cares, I wasn’t killed. Thanks to the HANS device, my Impact! Carbon Fiber helmet, and the superlative cage-welding skills of Matt “Tinman” Johnston, I’ll live to race another day. Ha! It takes more than that to kill me. However, dear readers, I feel compelled to make a small request. If you have a problem with one of my columns, feel free to use our provided “Comment” feature. Go ahead! Write all the mean stuff you want! That’s why it’s there! But please, please, stop trying to cancel my check on the track. To begin with, it’s expensive for everybody involved; also, it ain’t gonna work. Cheers!