The Frontstretch: Inside the Craftsman Truck Series: David Starr Driver Diary by David Starr -- Friday June 17, 2005

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In the few months since my last entry, we’ve had our ups and downs. Have I lived up to my expectations? No, I haven’t. Even though we’ve had four top-10 finishes in seven races, I’m still disappointed at our 11th place standing in the points. We’ve actually had a good truck everywhere except for Texas, but it just seems like we need a little luck on our side. Something strange has been happening to us and our finishing results don’t show how good we are in the race. But you’ve got to have things working at the end of the race and we just aren’t putting it together yet.

We have a championship caliber team and I thought we would have had more top-five finishes and even a couple of wins by now, but we haven’t had any of that. It’s not that we’ve been running bad, but for some reason or another we’ve just had different things happen to keep us from winning.

So now we’ve got our work cut out for us. With the Craftsman Truck Series being so competitive, if you’re just a little bit off, it will show in your finishing results. However, we’re not out of it by any means and we’re just going to keep on moving.

Dover is just one more example of how strange things keep happening to us. I had a great truck, but the early accident knocked the crush panels out of the truck and let in the exhaust. We also had a lot of tire smoke because at Dover there is so much travel in the suspension, since you are going so fast in the high-banked corners. I remember seeing the tire smoke, but what really made me sick during the race were the exhaust fumes that came inside the cockpit.

We had gone down a lap due to the accident and because it was before I got sick, I was able to get back the lap. When Hornaday was lapping everybody I was able to follow him, even though I was a lap down, and I passed all of the people he passed and eventually got the Lucky Dog pass. Then, somewhere around lap 80, I began to get sick. I workout, I train, I lift weights, I run, I try to eat well, and I don’t ever
get tired inside the truck, but on lap 80 I was really feeling fatigued and had no strength in my arms. However, I wasn’t about to quit. I knew I had a good truck and there were only 12 or 13 trucks on the lead lap. I kept feeling worse as the race went on, but there were times when the caution would come out and I could get some fresh air. When the race went back to green I passed two or three people and got back into he top-10, but after a couple of laps I would fade again because I was sick. Right there at the end, after a couple of cautions, I was able to get enough fresh air to tough it out. At the end of the race I was able to pass a couple more truck to climb back into the top-10 for an eighth place finish. I had a truck that was pretty awesome and probably a winning truck, but the driver was too sick to drive it.

I’m good now, but at the time the carbon monoxide level in my lungs was pretty high. They did take me to the hospital, and after treating it and getting the level down, I was released. I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t taste it, and I was talking fine, but it’s nothing to play around with. I’ve been racing my whole life I had never had that problem before. But I feel great now.

Most recently, we raced at my home track – Texas Motor Speedway – and the week before the race was pretty eventful for me. I was involved in the Sam Hornish Jr. Celebrity Bowling Tournament to raise money for the Speedway Children’s Charities and that was cool. I did pretty good, although I’m not much of a bowler. But it was a lot of fun and we had a good time raising lots of money.

I get a lot of media exposure when we come to Texas, so I also had a lot of radio interviews and things like that to do throughout the week. It’s always fun to come back home and race at Texas.

As for the race itself, Texas Motor Speedway is just a tough place to win at. We struggled in practice and never really could get the truck set up the way we liked it. When practice ended I told Dave McCarty he worked his magic like he always does, and he said it was either going to be really good or really bad.

It was pretty good in qualifying, but the problem was that when the race started we ran 10 or 15 laps and then discovered it was not very good on a long run. The longer we ran, the worse the truck got, and there was really not enough cautions in the race to allow us to try to fix it. In the end, we were really fortunate to get a top-10 finish because the handling was not there. We are really disappointed with that finish, but we’ll bounce back this week at Michigan.

I love going to Michigan because it’s a fun racetrack and you can run four wide. If you want to be competitive, you better have a lot of horsepower and your truck better handle well, because it’s definitely a handling racetrack. You have to have a lot of horses underneath the hood, and I believe we have all of that. Toyotas have a lot of horsepower so they’re going to be stout, and the Dodges always run good there, so it’s going to be a great race. I hope that when they drop that checkered flag you’ll see that Spears No. 75 Chevrolet Silverado at the front.

We’re now to the point of the season where we are racing almost weekly and I love it. If I could race twice a week or everyday, I would do it. We run 25 races a year in the Craftsman Truck Series and the season starts off kind of slow. I’m glad we’re going to start racing every week, that’s what I love to do; I actually wish we ran more races in the Truck Series. But the schedule is good for our racing team. All of the guys have families and kids, so it gives them time to spend at home. We’re now set up to go race five or six weeks straight and ready.

And I’m definitely looking forward to getting my Spears Chevrolet back into victory lane.

 

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