Two things to note before getting to my thoughts on 2013’s First Night:
1) I again live-tweeted the night of racing. You can read this at www.twitter.com/truedestruction It’s great if you like things 140 characters at a time with occasional spelling errors. I want to again mention that you do NOT need to have a twitter account to read this; you do, however, need to have a twitter account to follow the Behind the Destruction twitter feed, which I, of course, recommend all of you do. Special thanks to all those people who drunk-messaged me during the night with questions (ahem, Michael Noble) and took pictures of me talking into my phone.
2) The Behind the Destruction podcast recapping 2013’s First Night of TDA action is going to be recorded shortly and will be available for downloading next week; think May 29th.
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2013’s First Night is in the books and proved to be an interesting combination of the unexpected and the uneventful. There weren’t any real upsets on the night or enormous, mind-blowing hits (though Seek-N-Destroy’s Greg Mesich did come close by ripping through a Mean Green station wagon like it was tissue paper and then colliding with the wall) nor were there any races that stood out in a historical capacity, ala Gerritt “Big Kahuna” Vanderbilt missing the finish line by a foot or a knock down, drag out race like Orange Crush and Mean Green Machine Fourth Night of 2012 that lasted what felt like 74 minutes. The First Night races were toughly contested battles that all seemed to go (basically) according to expectations.
What came as something of a surprise were some of the individual performances. Raise your hand if you had Mesich or a friendly-fire collision between Damage, Inc. teammates Kyle Thompson and Matt Wilson competing for the hit-of-the-month. Anyone?
Raise your hand if you thought Orange Crush’s Jason Ritacco was going to catapult himself atop the race for MVP after one night of racing? Anyone? Hello?
Raise your hand if you thought Damage, Inc. was going to come out and give the Junkyard Dogs a run for their money in the first round. Anyone? Is this thing on?
Raise your hand if you thought that Mean Green Machine’s John Clemmons and the Junkyard Dogs’ Kyle Shearer would tally three checkered flags on the night. Anyone?
And raise your hand if you thought that Mean Green Machine’s drivers would target ex-Mean Green driver, Ryan Decker, when they raced Reckoning. Wait. Scratch that one.
But the point is that there were a lot of surprisingly good performances in places you wouldn’t have expected.
Let’s start with the positive: Damage, Inc.’s team of young guys looked like a team that will actually give other teams a lot of problems. Brice Martin proved that he is the right man to anchor Damage, Inc.’s lead runner spot and Alex “The Goat” Tucker had the prettiest hit of the night, a perfect, textbook shot to the driver’s side front quarter panel of Junkyard Dogs’ runner extraordinaire, Ryan Bleuer, that took him out. I was sitting at the perfect vantage point to watch Tucker’s hit on Bleuer and it was a thing of fundamental beauty.
When I first got involved with the TDA, it was explained to me that the ideal hit to take someone out would be for you drive into the driver’s side of other car’s front bumper at a 45 degree angle. And this was precisely what The Goat did. In his first race ever, he stopped one of the slipperiest runners in league history in textbook form. If Martin and Tucker can get Kyle Thompson to stop taking out his teammates, this team could end up catching a lot of people off guard. (For the time being, we’re going to ignore the part where their beauty car was driven by a guy wearing a Reckoning T-Shirt).
One driver who absolutely surprised the hell out of me was Ritacco. Ritacco has always been a competent driver, a solid member of a number of different teams over the years whom you knew wouldn’t let you down, but never really went beyond that. Consistently racing for teams that aren’t in the championship hunt can have this effect on things. When he raced last year as a part of the six-headed monster that was The Junkyard Dogs, I thought he accorded himself nicely (especially Fifth Night when JYD went to the finals), but it’s hard for anyone to champion personal accomplishments when your team has a very disappointing season.
Joining Orange Crush in the off-season after a brief dalliance with the notion of signing on to race with Seek-N-Destroy, Ritacco came out First Night and absolutely wowed everyone in the stands and played an extremely major role in helping his new team win the evening. He blocked, he hit, he cleared the way for his runners, his cars kept running and he never gave up. Even when he lost steering in the front straightaway, Ritacco didn’t stop racing. He did what he could to position himself in the best possible fashion to impede his opponents’ cars and then waited for the right time to pounce. And then he did.
He took out the Junkyard Dogs’ Bleuer in the second round and was an enormous thorn in the sides of all three teams that Orange Crush raced.
I spoke to Ritacco after the races and saw a man who couldn’t have been happier about where he was. When I asked him what different about racing for Orange Crush, he told me that he could go out and just race. “I’m going out there and doing what I want to do,” Ritacco stated. “We’ve got a game plan but it’s not something where I can’t do this or I can’t do that. I’m free to do what I need to do.”
Going forward, Orange Crush looks really good. Their roster might not have the name recognition of The Junkyard Dogs or Reckoning, but they race together better than anyone and have the juggernaut known as Carl Brouwer on their team. Brouwer took a couple of years off from racing, returned to the TDA circuit in 2012 and, when he has raced, Orange Crush has gone an amazing 10-1.
10-1!!!!!!
When Brouwer’s raced, Orange Crush has won three nights and lost in the second round once. Brouwer is tearing through things with such power, I’m not sure how I’ve avoided making a ‘Wine ‘em, Dine ‘em, 69 ‘em’ joke yet… and it’s getting harder and harder not to, the more he wins.
On the other side of things, The Junkyard Dogs quizzical bad luck and inexplicably subpar on-track performances apparently carried over from 2012. They were forced to race their first round race against Damage, Inc. without the ‘Vander’ portion of their VanderBleuer running tandem (Gerritt Vanderbilt). Thanks to engine troubles, Vanderbilt only had one eighties car at the track. Joe Snow filled the fourth spot for JYD and they had Bleuer and Kyle Shearer on lap running duties. Yes, crusher Kyle Shearer… who then went on to win the race.
Bleuer was taken out by a Damage, Inc. driver, The Goat, racing in his first race (which I covered above) and, despite having Damage, Inc.’s Thompson take out his own teammate (also covered above), it isn’t a stretch to suggest that the Junkyard Dogs could still have been beaten.
Though both Reckoning and the Junkyard Dogs lost in the second round, the differences between how they did so seemed in rather stark contrast from one another. JYD eeked out a victory against Damage, Inc. and Reckoning seemed to almost toy with Full Throttle in their opening round race; when Reckoning’s Brian Anderson crossed the finish line, Reckoning still had all four of their cars moving and Full Throttle had none.
Reckoning didn’t look anywhere near as good in the second round, but their problems look easily fixed; if Andrew Sherman doesn’t keep initiating crashes with Reckoning’s opponents as he runs laps, that would help a lot. In the case of the Junkyard Dogs though, I, again, don’t know what to say. They don’t look bad by any stretch of the imagination, but knowing how talented Bleuer, Vanderbilt, Shearer, Snow and 2012 MVP Tom “Brickman” Lewis are, it’s weird to see them even have a single hiccup in a race against a very inexperienced team like Damage, Inc. I mean, Damage, Inc.’s drivers combined raced in 7 or 8 races in 2012. JYD’s team members raced almost double that number in 2012’s Fifth Night alone.
So First Night is behind us and, generally speaking, we didn’t actually learn anything new. Orange Crush, Reckoning, Mean Green Machines and Junkyard Dogs are still the teams to beat, Full Throttle got another tough first round draw, Brouwer is still laughing at the rest of the league (10-1, bitches!!!!!!), Mean Green’s Zac VanAllen still knows how to celebrate and Reckoning’s “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht is still criminally unheralded. Who would have ever thought to expect the expected?