The first race of Team Scuba's 2008 season is in the books. Competing in the Goodyear Challenge Series season opener, Ray Black Jr. began his quest for success in Nascar's Camping World East Series. Using the late model stock car series gives the team some live action practice before their first Camping World outing in South Carolina on April 19th.
Saturday night's event saw 22 cars show up at New Smyrna Speedway to compete in the 100 lap race. With so much focus being placed on the Camping World Series and all of the crew changes this year, Team Scuba has had to make a lot of adjustments and last minute preparations. As a result the first outing for the team was less successful than we had hoped. However, the results did confirm the wisdom in using the late model series to get the team tuned up. Of the 22 cars, Ray Jr.'s qualification time placed him starting in the 19th position. Approximately mid-race he had a moderately significant altercation with the wall coming out of turn 2. Unfortunately when he hit the wall it twisted the right front tire and bent the upper swing arm so bad that it collapsed one side of the right front shock absorber. The Goodyear Challenge Series frequently sees as many as 50% of the cars knocked out before the end of the race. So in the end, even though he was unable to finish the race, the series' point allocation system recorded Ray Jr. as finishing 16th overall, an advance of 3 positions from his starting spot.
We have a lot of photos and video from the event, including the wall incident, so keep your eye on the full Team Scuba website so you can see the action when it becomes available later this week.
