The Good Luck Award: MEAN GREEN MACHINE
Call it the luck of the Green. For the second year in a row, Mean Green Machine figure out a way to lose… and still move on to race again.
Fourth Night of the season, Mean Green Machine took on Full Throttle in the first round in one of the year’s most entertaining races. At the time, it struck me as being significantly longer than usual, but I was enjoying myself so much, I was actually glad that this was the case. Well, it turns out that the reason it was so long was because it wasn’t stopped after Full Throttle’s runner, Levi Turnbaugh, completed his first five laps. The scorers somehow missed one of Turnbaugh’s laps. Given this window of opportunity, Mean Green Machine leapt through. They completed five laps after Full Throttle did… and were credited with the win.
They parlayed this bit of good luck into a second round victory and then another victory in the night’s finals against Orange Crush. It’s hard to win the night while going 2-1, but Mean Green Machine was up to the task.
This was on the heels of their 2010’s First Night matchup against Smash, Bash and Crash where they lost–“Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht drove for Smash, Bash and Crash and effectively won the race himself, completing four plus laps at which point the race went to a countdown–and Mean Green Machine still got to move on to the second round because Smash, Bash and Crash didn’t have enough cars to race.
In the last 105 races, two of them have ended with a losing team actually winning… and in both cases, that team was Mean Green Machine. Maybe there’s some truth to the matter that Mean Green Machine driver Ryan Decker is so powerful he can manufacture wins out of losses. I can’t really see any other logical explanation unless Tim Tebow is somehow involved.