Eldora Speedway
Head-on lick triggers scramble for Feger's crew
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Jason Feger's team pulls a motor at Eldora. (Zach Yost)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Sept. 11) — Jason Feger was turned to the left from contact and headed for the concrete inside wall on Eldora Speedway’s backstretch three laps into Friday’s fourth qualifying race. He knew an impact was coming, but how severe would it be?
“I’ve had some instances on the backstretch here before where we’ve gotten to the (inside) fence, but it’s really weird,” Feger said later while standing in the pit area. “You think it’s not going to be that bad and it doesn’t feel like you're going that fast, and then, like all of a sudden, it feels like you just take flight and it just speeds up. You think you’re gonna be OK, and it’s gonna stop, and then it just speeds up and you hit the wall.”
Which was the difficult fate for the 48-year-old veteran from Bloomington, Ill., who slammed into that inside barrier with pretty solid force.
“It was a really hard hit,” Feger said. “I mean, probably the hardest head-on hit I've ever had. The only hit I remember being actually harder was when I flipped here a while back, but it wasn’t a head-on hit like this one.”
Feger wasn’t injured and, in fact, felt fortunate that the accident wasn’t worse. Crashing a few more feet towards turn three could have exacerbated the situation.
“I saw the opening (in the turn-three wall) coming and I thought, ‘Oh no,’ ” Feger said. “I thought I was going to get in that opening at one point, so if it was gonna happen, I was glad I didn’t get into that.”
The incident continued a frustrating set of preliminary nights for Feger, who qualified exceptionally well on Thursday (third-fastest) and Friday (fourth) but ended up being collected in tangles during his shootout races each evening. On Thursday his car was torn up in the scramble that followed Tyler Erb’s spin off turn two, and then in Friday’s 15-lapper a blow from Jason Jameson while racing for position sent him reeling.
Feger had no time to react when Jameson suddenly cut toward the inside of the track as they barreled down the backstretch. Jameson clipped Feger’s car and drove on as Feger lost control from the contact.
“When you’re on the outside like that, it’s hard to see the guy way down on the bottom the way these cars are,” Feger said, expressing no notable animosity toward Jameson for the encounter. “I don’t know exactly, but I guess somebody slid him and I slipped front of him, and I think his thought was he’s probably going to get a run and go down there and slide him back. So he come down and I seen him coming down, and I started turning left, but I didn’t think he was going to come down as far and as fast and as hard as he did and it just hit me in the right-front a ton and just sent me flying.”
Feger’s Longhorn Chassis was left with a mangled front end.
“The best-case scenario, it probably needs a front clip,” he said. “Just unfortunate because the car’s been really fast, had a lot of speed two nights in a row.”
The qualifying success, however, put him on the bad end of the six-car invert for the shootouts. He started sixth both nights and found himself in the tangles that inverted drivers always fear — and in Feger’s case, prompted him to call for the inversion to “go away” because he “would rather earn it through hard work than lotto racing.”
Feger’s qualifying laps did earn him fast-time provisionals into the 25-lap semifeatures each night. He salvaged an 18th-place finish Thursday and climbed forward further Friday to place 13th, though he experienced more trouble with the backup car he pulled out of his trailer to run after the shootout wreck.
“We’re really good (with the backup) and the motor started missing about lap 12, and now the motor’s blown up in it,” Feger said while surveying a postrace scene at his trailer that included his disabled backup car sitting alongside the crashed machine that was on jackstands. “It missed for a long time. I think we had an electrical problem, and then I don’t know if a crank trigger or a battery or something went, but then I think it must have finally been a rod bearing. Luckily it stayed together to get us what we did … and I think at the end of that feature we were actually one of the fastest cars on the track, so it’s disappointing.”
Feger and his Jason Palubicki-led crew had a late night filled with work ahead of them to ready themselves for Saturday’s World 100 finale. With the primary car sidelined by the crash, the plan was to pull the engine out of it — Feger noted that the motor would have to come out anyway for the frame to be sent to Longhorn Chassis for repairs — and put it in the backup car.
While Feger remained confident that he could rally Saturday, cracking the World 100 starting for the third time in the last four years and 10th time overall in his career won’t be an easy task. Feger, whose career-best World 100 finish is fourth in 2014, was 11th in prelim points and Saturday’s inversion number was six, so he’s starting fifth in the fifth heat — a highly-competitive qualifier that has former World 100 winners Ricky Thornton Jr. and Jonathan Davenport sharing the front row, perennial contender Chris Madden and Sam Seawright (a top-10 finisher in June’s Dream) in Row 2 and Tyler Erb alongside him in the sixth spot.
