Minor Point #1: Damage, Inc’s Matt Wilson is Mr. Persistent
During the first two races of his young racing career, Matt Wilson has been active, fearless and determined. This is almost the exact opposite of the Damage, Inc team as a whole.
At numerous points during Damage, Inc’s opening round match-up against Full Throttle, Wilson’s was the only car moving. And was he ever moving. Up and down, side to side and back and forth across the infield, Wilson was a man possessed. He didn’t always make the hardest contact with the other cars—there were some field issues at play—but his energy level and enthusiasm were obvious to almost everyone.
My hope for Wilson is that he continues to race aggressively and strong. When faced with a situation like Damage, Inc is currently enduring with lots of roster turnover and an owner who is actually racing for another team, it would be very easy to throw in the towel or go half speed, but thus far, Wilson is doing anything but this. He is meeting the adversity head on and kicking ass while doing so.
If you put the Roadrunner behind the wheel of a demo car (nicknamed him One Nut), gave him some amphetamines and told him to go crush, the results would look like what Wilson is currently doing. He is unquestionably the most hyperactive, frenetic crusher in the league. If he keeps driving, building and learning, Wilson is going to be a true force in another three years.
Minor Point #2: Things You Don’t Like To See
I think I’m going to begin compiling a list of things that I don’t want to see prior to a race. I got this idea at about 6:15PM before the last night of racing as I watched a driver on Damage, Inc beating down the front end of his car with the butt end of a nearly four foot long axe.
#1) A driver beating down the front end of his car with the butt of a nearly four foot long axe.
#2) Teams torching in the pits.
#3) Teams struggling to get their fourth car on the track.
Not altogether surprisingly, the teams that I saw doing these things all lost in the first round of Second Night.
Minor Point #3: Things You Do Like To See
I can’t create a list of things I don’t want to see without balancing it out with a list of things I want to see too.
#1) Teams heckling Jason Twite as he’s trying to do his video intros. Watching the Reckoning drivers passionately embracing one another behind Twite as he spoke on camera was one of the funnier things I witnessed Second Night. And I know someone can top this before Third Night.
#2) The enthusiasm of Damage, Inc’s Matt Wilson.
#3) The way that Johnny Ryan and Tom “Brickman” Lewis look out for their teammates.
#4) Seek-N-Destroy racing hard. Greg Mesich’s team has turned a corner and they are back and competing hard.
#5) Bad Company sticking with it and eeking out the closest win I can ever recall seeing. They are used to hitting people and racing a smash-mouthed style of demo, but in the first round against Seek-N-Destroy, they went 180 degrees away from that and still pulled out a win.
#6) The Third Night race will be on Speed Channel.
Minor Point #4: The Unfounded Cheating Allegations Have Started
One thing that fascinates me about the culture of the TDA is how, if a team is winning, the other teams will accuse them of cheating. Orange Crush was the champion in 2010 and, as such, was subjected to numerous allegations of cheating throughout the year. Numerous, completely unfounded allegations of cheating.
In the off-season, members of Orange Crush extended an open invitation to the other TDA drivers to come down to their shop and investigate their cars. Reckoning’s Brian Anderson accepted the invite and went down one weekend. He looked at Orange Crush’s 2010 Fourth and Fifth Night cars. Nothing had been removed and nothing had been monkeyed with; the cars were exactly the way they were when they were pulled off the track. And Anderson found nothing wrong with them. Not one thing.
Having completed two races in the 2011 season, people are again becoming suspect of Orange Crush’s cars. I want to nip this line of thinking in the bud: it is complete garbage. If this wasn’t a family web-site, I’d go off on a blue streak here that would rival Eddie Murphy’s Raw. It’s that much, uh, garbage.
Orange Crush has some very talented car builders on their team and those drivers spend entirely too many hours preparing their cars so that they will hold up under the most extreme circumstances. The same holds true with Reckoning and any number of other teams.
When you see two cars hit each other and one car drives away with no visible damage and the other crumples up like paper, don’t start talking about cheating, start talking about the good car building that is evident.
Minor Point #5: Mel Noble Jr.’s Crazy First Night got Crazier
I lauded Stranglehold’s Mel Noble Jr. after First Night for his—what’s the term?—completely insane driving on the track. He lost his helmet and then went and sought out a head on hit with another driver. It’s the thing legends are made of. 40 years from now, I’m sure Mel Noble IV will have grown disgusted hearing about how his grandfather once crashed into a car at full speed WITHOUT A HELMET ON. Normally, stories grow with time and become embellished, more grandiose versions of the truth. In this case, I didn’t think it was possible to make this story any bigger or crazier than it already was. Noble Jr. took a hit, had his helmet pop off (and fly out his driver’s window no less), turned around and then crashed head first into another car. On purpose.
How do you top that?
You don’t, right?
Wrong. Noble Jr.’s amazing crazy did, in fact, get even crazier.
In between First and Second Night, the TDA actually changed its rules in an attempt to prevent something like Noble Jr.’s helmetless head-on from happening again. Going forward, anytime a driver loses his helmet—when it pops completely off his head—the driver’s team is now automatically disqualified.
More impressively, Noble Jr. has somehow escaped this entire affair without garnering a nickname. This is probably the most egregious oversight of the year… and it changes here.
My first thought was to give Noble Jr. the “Crazy” moniker. However, Art Scarbro has that nickname and, unlike the NFL, we’re not going to reuse nicknames here.
My second thought was to give Noble Jr. a nickname referencing The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. My first attempt was Mel “Ichabod Crane” Noble Jr. Since that sounds worse than any number of early Radiohead songs, I quickly scrapped that.*
* If Noble Jr. had been a driver who specialized in driving slowly and not ever crashing into anyone, the nickname of ‘Reason’ would have been fantastic. Why? Because Mel “Reason” Noble Jr. just sounds awesome.
That’s when it finally hit me: Mel Noble Jr. is The Headless ‘Hold’s Man. Let it be said.
Minor Point #5.5: The Insanity List
If you have any good stories of Demo Crazy, please e-mail them to me at TrackSideat66@gmail.com or message me at facebook.com/chrisneumer. I’d like to compile a top ten list.