Normally I start out my columns with a pithy one-liner or some reference to the weather.  Not today.  Today, there’s only one way to start: Holy shit, Real Steel won the night!

Over the course of the last five years, there have certainly been some surprising teams that made it to the finals—Damage, Inc. made it last year, Stranglehold made it the year before—but there haven’t ever really been any surprise champions.  Seek-N-Destroy won First Night 2010, but even that wasn’t that much of a shock as they’d come in second on the season the year in 2009.  Real Steel winning 2013’s Second Night changes this; prior to the night of racing, no one—and I mean no one—thought Real Steel had much of a chance to get to the finals, let alone win them.  Yet, here we are, looking at the most unexpected night champion of the last five years.  Welcome, boys, it’s good to see some new blood at the top of the standings!

Starting two rookies, Shaun Elder and Tony Hartung, as well as Nick and Wally Hartung (who have, combined, been on 7+ different teams over the last three years), Real Steel came out and beat Damage, Inc., The Junkyard Dogs and Orange Crush on their road to the night win.  It was anything but a creampuff lineup—and surprisingly, it seemed like Real Steel had the most trouble with the team they should have had the easiest time with, Damage, Inc.—and Real Steel hung with and then beat all three teams they faced.

What made Real Steel’s accomplishment Second Night so stunning was how it was 180 degrees from the performance that they delivered First Night.  First Night, Real Steel came out against Orange Crush and was absolutely destroyed.  They had mechanical issues and made some decisions on the track that they instantly wanted mulligans on; the most glaring of these was when Tony Hartung went inside the turn 4 tire in an attempt to take out Orange Crush’s Carl Brouwer rather than wait for him to come around the outside.  Real Steel spent the last month working to correct these issues and then came out strong Second Night.  Save for Nick Hartung’s two-minute hiccup at the beginning of the final race, Real Steel’s car kept running and their races were surgically executed.  Shaun Elder drove like a man possessed and didn’t let a little things like the fact that his car was in the process of splitting in half impact his driving, winning two races on the evening.

As is the expected par for the Real Steel course, they didn’t necessarily over power their opponents or blow by them in the straight aways, but rather, they raced incredibly smartly and worked together as a team.

In their second round race against The Junkyard Dogs, JYD’s Ryan Bleuer and Real Steel’s Elder were neck and neck in their last lap coming out of turn 2.  Bleuer made an incredibly nice manouever to pull in front of Elder near turn 3 and began to pull away when Elder’s teammate, Nick Hartung, came in, hit Bleuer in turn 4, spinning him out.  It wasn’t a highlight reel hit by any stretch of the imagination, but it was probably the hit of the night.  It saved the race for Real Steel.  Nick Hartung was aware of what was going on and did what he could to prevent The Junkyard Dogs from winning.  And that’s as Real Steel as it gets.

Probably the most impressive win Real Steel had on the night was against Orange Crush in the finals.  This wasn’t because Orange Crush won First Night but rather because when Nick Hartung couldn’t get his car off the starting line for the first two plus laps of the race, his three teammates somehow held together until he could join the fray… at which point, Real Steel took over and went on to win.  No matter how you look at it—Real Steel spent half the race down a car and pulled out the victory—they looked like they’d been racing together for years, not weeks.

Besides Real Steel’s triumphant march to the victor’s circle, there wasn’t a whole lot to like about Second Night.  The Junkyard Dogs did seem to race better, beating Mean Green Machine first round before bowing out to Real Steel in the second round in one of the closest races in history,* Orange Crush built off their success First Night and continued to win, again making it to the finals, and, I suppose if you squint, you could argue that Damage, Inc. raced well given the extremely up-in-the-air circumstances surrounding the team (at 5:30PM, no one had any idea if Damage, Inc. was even going to be able to scrape together four cars to race first round).  However, that was it on the positive side of things.

* I don’t think it was the closest race by virtue of a technicality.  I still think that the Junkyard Dogs race in 2012 against Full Throttle where Gerritt “Big Kahuna” Vanderbilt’s car stopped 18 inches short of the finish line was a closer finish (see photo to right), even if he wasn’t moving at the time the race ended.

The first round was one of the worst rounds of racing I can remember ever seeing.  I mean, it featured two honest-to-goodness 4-on-3 races, Seek-N-Destroy vs. Full Throttle and Mean Green Machine vs. Junkyard Dogs and another in the Reckoning vs. Orange Crush matchup that felt like a 4-on-3 race because Reckoning’s lead runner, Brian Anderson, was effectively crippled in the first six seconds of the race and rudely introduced to the wall by Orange Crush’s Elmer Fandrey 30 seconds after that.  (With Nick Hartung experiencing major car problems at the beginning of the final race, it seemed as though we were on a pace to seem roughly half the races raced 4-on-3.  Hartung fixed his car’s issue though and we were fortunately sparred that ignominy).  In one of the stranger elements of the night, the best race of the first round was between Real Steel and the team that TDA officials were legitimately worried had disbanded earlier in the week.

What made this first round even more unusual was how evenly paired the matchups seemed.  First Night, the four teams that most people thought would finish the season atop the standings faced the four teams that most people thought would finished in the bottom half of the standings.  Second Night, the exact opposite happened.  The four teams atop the standings faced off against one another as did the four teams in the bottom half of the standings creating what one might logically expect to be an evenly matched series of races… until the teams actually raced.  What followed was three supremely lopsided races and one well-fought race.  Compounding this, the second round featured two wildly entertaining races between teams that, on paper, seemed slightly mismatched.

Going into the 2013, there were a lot of unknowns about the teams.  The top six teams all seemed as though they had a shot at the title.  The Junkyard Dogs, Orange Crush, Mean Green Machine and Reckoning seemed to be the league’s power teams, but Full Throttle and Real Steel were certainly in the mix as well.  After two nights of racing, there aren’t a whole lot of those questions that have been answered.

The expectation is for teams to build off of their last performances and to improve or to maintain a level of consistency from one night to the next.  It’s what sportswriters call ‘momentum’.  However, there hasn’t been any such thing in the TDA this year.  Reckoning and Mean Green Machine looked pretty good First Night and came out Second Night as flat as can be.  Real Steel looked abysmal First Night and came out Second Night and won the whole thing.

What’s going to be great about Third Night is that we will finally have an idea of which of a team’s performances is a fluke.  If Reckoning comes out and loses to Seek-N-Destroy, we’ll know that First Night was the outlier.  If Mean Green Machine wins the night, we’ll know that their first round loss to Junkyard Dogs was a temporary hiccup.

Thus far in 2013, there are only two things that have been consistent:

1)   Orange Crush has been good.

2)   Seek-N-Destroy has not been.

Damage, Inc. has raced tough in their two races year—Martin and Alex “The Goat” Tucker should be commended for the energy and effort they are putting in on the track—but both ended in losses.  I’d say they were a scrappy, fight tooth-and-nail team that is going to upset somebody, except it hasn’t happened yet.

We will just have to wait another four weeks to find out exactly what is what.