NASCAR

BNS: Greg Schaefer Dover race report

Greg Schaefer Disappointed by Early Dover Downs Race Exit Hatboro, Pennsylvania's Greg Schaefer was looking forward to continuing his successful part-time NASCAR Busch North Series schedule with a good run at Dover Downs International Speedway.

Edited: Dec 22, 2003, 5:59 AM

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Greg Schaefer Disappointed by Early Dover Downs Race Exit

Hatboro, Pennsylvania's Greg Schaefer was looking forward to continuing his successful part-time NASCAR Busch North Series schedule with a good run at Dover Downs International Speedway. During a year where Schaefer has excelled on the longer tracks that the series competes on, the fast, one-mile concrete oval was a highlight to the driver.

Practice and qualifying were all but eliminated by rain on Thursday. The only practice held totaled about 45 minutes, leaving Schaefer and the Parks-Schaefer crew with a list of things to try that went uncompleted. With season points determining the starting lineup, Schaefer, who had only competed in ten of the seventeen events held this year, was assigned the 20th starting spot.

"I think it will be a good race car," Schaefer said before the race. "It's a good thing we didn't qualify because I don't think we had a good qualifying car. I'm going to have to be real patient, especially at the start. You've got some cars that were slower in practice starting up front and guys who were faster in practice starting in the back. The first ten or twenty laps will be hair-raising, once everything settles down hopefully everyone will settle into a groove."

The race was only about five laps old when things started to go amiss under the hood of Schaefer's Rite-Way Electric Chevrolet. Smoke was seen coming from the exhaust and he pitted and the crew looked under the hood. It was determined that the engine problem was internal and the car was retired after completing only eleven laps.

"I don't know what happened to the car, we blew something on lap five or something, real early," he said. "It was the head gasket or something that went, smoke was coming out of the pipes and it wasn't running too good either. It was hugely disappointing. We had a lot of people in the stands, all the people from Rite-Way were here. It's really a shame. We'll just have to put a new motor in it and go racing again at Stafford."

Schaefer tried to find a positive in what had been a very negative race day.

"I think we had a decent car there, though I only had five laps to see," he said. "It felt comfortable, and the way thing panned out I'm sure we would have been in the top ten somewhere, there weren't a lot of cars left at the end out there."

Next up for Schaefer is next weekend at Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut. Schaefer has a top-ten finish at Stafford to his credit already this year, and looks forward to returning.

-AJC-

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