Let’s start this one out with a bang. I fucked up.
I watched the second round race between The Locomotives and Real Steel on Saturday and thought The Locomotives won by 8 inches. It turns out they actually won by a lap and eight inches.
I had help (or lack thereof, depending on your perspective) in my fucking up from the scoreboard, the flag girl, people associated with the league and the drivers on the track.
At the tail end of the race in question, it was red flagged for a fire in Wally Hartung’s Real Steel car. When the action was restarted, race leader, The Locomotives’ Mark Van Allen, didn’t move; his car was dead. Real Steel’s Nick Hartung did, however, start moving down the front straight away, at which point in time the flag girl very clearly began waving the white flag at him (you can see this in the above screen grab from the video). I remembered that from night and confirmed that it happened by watching a fan video of the race.
Nick Hartung’s car was stopped soon thereafter, at which point in time teammate Wally Hartung began trying to push Nick Hartung’s car to the finish line, clearly believing that he was on his last lap. I could be mistaken, but I’m guessing that Wally Hartung’s plan was not to push Nick Hartung’s car to the finish line and then around the track for another lap.
When the race finally ended in a countdown, the cars were very carefully removed so that due diligence could be followed in ensuring that the correct victor had been crowned. A person affiliated with the league later told me that he was upset that no one was up in the crow’s nest taking pictures because he wanted to see how close a finish it had been. Other drivers spoke to me about how crazy close the race had been.
But of course, in the end, it wasn’t close at all. The Locomotives won by more than a lap.
Now, normally, thinking that one team would win by eight inches as opposed to a lap and eight inches wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s basically what everyone in the pits thought. But I’m not ‘normally’.
I wrote up my First Night thoughts with this wrong fact in mind. It paved the road for me to write about how Real Steel was a smart team, always knowing where their drivers were in the course of the race, and to discuss how entertaining it was to witness people cheering on Wally Hartung in his ultimate and (really, really, really) futile attempts to push Nick Hartung’s car passed Van Allen’s. I also decided to hold off on writing about The Locomotives’ First Night exploits because I thought their only win against a ‘real’ team was by, you guessed it, eight inches. And while you might want to brag about your eight inches in some arenas, that margin of victory at Route 66 is not one of those places.
With this in mind, I held off.
… And then I promptly learned that it was a lap and eight inches.
In a situation like this, I’d usually go back and edit the original article to reflect these changes, but in this case I can’t. The whole narrative of the race changed after I’d already viewed it.
So, Locomotives fans, support staff and drivers (Tom “Brickman” Lewis, Dave “Repo” Swan, “Sneaky” Pete Ryan and Mark “I Need a Nickname” Van Allen), I fucked up. It wasn’t close.