In part one of my three part 2013 TDA preview, I covered the new point system and, summing up about 1,200 words into one sentence, figured out that to win the championship, teams are going to have to get to the finals repeatedly. Shocking, I know. (Since first round wins are now only worth one point, no one is ever making up ground, or even holding on it, by going .500 on the night). In part two of the 2013 preview, I’m going to begin answering the question: which teams will be able to get to the finals two or more times this year? In this part, I’ll look at the two teams that don’t seem to have a prayer or reaching the finals more than once and the two teams that could, but will need some luck to do so.
TEAMS THAT ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY WON’T BE ABLE TO GET TO THE FINALS TWICE OR MORE
Damage, Inc. and Seek-N-Destroy
Both teams, as presently constructed, seem almost like expansion teams. They are filled mostly with inexperienced drivers who don’t have a lot of connections to the rest of the league. I’d definitely put Damage, Inc. ahead of Seek-N-Destroy because Brice Martin and Kyle “No Longer Danger Seeker” Thompson have a couple of good years of racing under their belts and are still hungry to do better. I can’t say the same for anyone on Seek-N-Destroy. Team owner Greg Mesich is the only driver on Seek-N-Destroy to have raced a full season before and last year, he ended up sitting a couple of races.
Seek-N-Destroy had some very competent drivers in 2012, but still finished tied for last. Things went downhill from there as they quickly lost Steve Schaefer (to Full Throttle), Steve Gursky Sr. (to retirement) and Chris McGuire (to Orange Crush). The only remaining driver for Seek-and-Destroy (for the fourth year running) is Mesich. With the roster they have presently, I have no idea who is running (besides Mesich) and who is crushing. My only hope for Seek-N-Destroy that their cars manage to keep running for more than a lap or two, something they weren’t able to do in 2012 on anything resembling a regular basis.
The 2013 season does not look good for Seek-N-Destroy. If they win more than one race on the year, it should be looked at as an incredibly major accomplishment. If they win a single race, they can feel pretty good about themselves. They face a very uphill battle.
Though Damage, Inc. doesn’t seem to have much of a shot at reaching the finals twice or more this year—lest we forget, the team has reached the finals only once in the previous ten years combined—they are in a better place than Seek-N-Destroy. They have two young drivers with experience, Martin and Thompson, and a couple of others who have raced a race or two here and there. I think Damage, Inc. has the potential to surprise a couple of teams throughout the year (Again, I mention that this preview is being written under the assumption that Dave Swan and Pete Ryan remain on Mean Green Machine for the duration of the year and don’t race for Damage, Inc.; if Swan and Ryan were racing for Damage, Inc. I’d have the team ranked much higher).
I think Damage, Inc. is going to be a fun team to watch with guys going out and hitting hard. They are going to drive fast, try to make highlight reel crashes all the time and with be a lot of fun to watch. I hope this happens A) because I like cheering for underdogs who fight hard, and B) I’m a sucker for any team with a driver whose nickname is “The Goat” (Alex Tucker). Damage, Inc. seems like they could be building a nucleus for the future, a storyline I would have hit a lot harder if they hadn’t lost Andrew “Where the Hell Did He Come From?” Sherman to Reckoning in the off-season. That said, these young guys have plenty of fight and verve in them, a knowledgeable owner and the wherewith all to win. Just not multiple times a night, multiple times a season.
TEAMS THAT WILL NEED SOME LUCK TO GET TO THE FINALS TWICE OR MORE
Full Throttle and Real Steel
These two teams are rather intriguing, if nothing else, from a roster-building standpoint. Intriguing because the roster-building couldn’t have been more different. Full Throttle tried to keep their same four drivers together for a third year in a row and Real Steel, as a new team, had to find all four of their drivers. Interestingly, both teams ended up in the exact same spot: as veteran heavy teams with one or two younger guys who look primed to improve.
Full Throttle entered the off-season after a somewhat disappointed 2012 season intent on keeping things the same. Not only were they the only team in the league to only list four drivers on their roster in 2012, but they were the same four drivers that the team had in 2011. Their plan was to not change a thing: 2013 would feature the same four drivers again; Ron Johnston, Pete Milette Jr., Levi Turnbaugh and Jay VanAllen. And then Milette Jr. decided that he just had to go and tear his ACL, throwing a rather large monkey wrench into the team’s plans.*
* As an aside, Milette Jr. was a driver I was genuinely looking forward to watching in 2013. Since joining Full Throttle in 2011, Milette Jr. has been improving his game monumentally. So much so that, if he played baseball, he’d assuredly have been accused of using some PEDs. It’s a genuine shame that Milette Jr. won’t be behind the wheel of a Full Throttle car this year. May his recovery go smoothly and quickly so that in May of 2014, there won’t be throws of fans arguing that Milette Jr. needs to drive to support his teammates, ala the current Derrick Rose situation.
So Full Throttle brought in Steve Schaefer, formerly of Seek-N-Destroy. Schaefer is a driver with a lot of potential who hasn’t quite put all the pieces together yet. He had some car-building issues in 2012 that caused him to bow out of a couple of races much earlier than anticipated. He’s getting better in this regard, but has also been at a bit of a disadvantage in the past racing for Seek-N-Destroy. While I can list two dozen drivers off the top of my head who have a style of car building that they adhere to and will (occasionally) discuss with younger drivers, none has spent much time on Seek-N-Destroy in recent years. As such, one of the biggest keys to Full Throttle’s season this year will be in ensuring that Schaefer’s car building is up to snuff. If it is, this is a fierce group of drivers who know what they are doing and are capable of doing it with precision.
One other point I’d like to make about Full Throttle is that they could use a little bit of good luck as well. In 2012, they faced an absolute murderer’s row of a schedule. They raced season champs Reckoning twice, second place teams Mean Green Machine and Orange Crush four times and the Junkyard Dogs once; Full Throttle had only two races against other teams, both of which they won. To put this in perspective, Reckoning faced the ‘other’ teams a total of seven times, and won six of them. As with any sport, the key to a good record is beating the teams you’re better than and hoping for a .500 record against the elite teams. Of course, as Full Throttle learned, if you only face elite teams, that equation quickly gets thrown out the window. (It would also be helpful if they got credit for winning all the races that they actually won, but this is neither here nor there).
With Milette Jr. blowing out his ACL, you can see how well that good luck thing is starting off for them.
Real Steel is the league’s newest team, replacing long time stalwart, Stranglehold. And, almost immediately, Real Steel finds themselves enmeshed in a bizarre situation. Imagine this scenario in another sport: More than half of the previous year’s championship team leaves to start an expansion team that they will now own. This new team now has a mix of new school and old school know-how to it, access to a line of top-notch equipment and the owner absolutely, positively knows what it takes to win. You’d probably be thinking: holy shit, that team is going to challenge for the title, right?
Well, that precise situation is what happened with Real Steel and for some reason, no one is remotely worried about them. Wally Hartung, Nick Hartung and behind-the-scenes man, Jeff Elder, left Reckoning in the off-season to start Real Steel. They recruited two men to drive in whom they have the utmost trust and respect: another Hartung and Elder (and brought in Mark Warner Jr. as well).
One of the biggest things Real Steel has going for it right now is its underdog status. Teams will often look beyond them, automatically (and mistakenly) assuming that a race against Real Steel will be a win. Teams often did this when looking at Reckoning and you can see how well that worked out for the other teams.
After much pondering, I’ve realized why this is the case: when driving, Wally and Nick Hartung don’t do any of the things that would ever land them on SportsCenter, save for the random burst fuel line fire. They aren’t speed demons, they don’t tattoo other cars and they are quite content on letting the other teams’ drivers defeat themselves, rather than smashing the hell out of them. They are knuckleballers to the rest of pitchers.
And I understand this completely.
I played tennis in high school and employed a similar approach on the court. I didn’t have anything resembling the otherworldly power that the top players had so counting on myself to deliver a cross-court smash or wickedly fast backhand was ridiculous; it wasn’t something I could do. What I could do, however, was return the ball. Time and again, I hit the ball and put it in play. Eventually, the bigger, faster, stronger players would make a mistake and I’d win the point. I wasn’t getting the cheerleaders with my game (also, I was playing tennis), but I was winning. That way, when I went home and wept about not dating a cheerleader, I could at least take solace in the fact that I won my match. But at least I’m not still bitter about it.
Fortunately for the Hartungs, they’re spoken for and, as long as they don’t run into many car-building issues, I think Real Steel will give a lot of teams a very well thought out, very well planned strategy that will leave the other teams shaking their heads and wondering, “How did we just lose to them?”
… And then going home with the cheerleaders.
PART THREE OF THE 2013 TDA PREVIEW WILL FOCUS ON BREAKING DOWN THE TEAMS THAT HAVE THE BEST SHOT OF WINNING THE YEAR’S CHAMPIONSHIP