I’m often asked about which drivers or what teams I root for at the Team Demo Association (TDA) events. And while I freely admit that it sounds like a cop out, the truth is that I root for the best story. I find myself rooting for entertaining contradictions, upsets and interesting quirks. To me that’s what makes life good. If everything plays out exactly like it is supposed to, where’s the fun in that?
When I saw that the first race of the night—the first race of the season!—was between two of the fill-in teams, The Crazy 8s and The Locomotives, I was hooked. One of the Crazy 8s driver’s raced a car that had been raced in the Bangin’ for Boobs race last year… Another driver raced a car he’d set up four years ago. It didn’t matter which team won, one of them was miraculously going to the second round. And as it stands, The Locomotives are currently ahead of the Junkyard Dogs in the standings!
I think if The Locomotives had beaten Orange Crush in the second round of First Night, it’d have been my favorite race of all time. I mean, how much better could it get than having a team that couldn’t even field eight cars on the night beat the perennial contender… with one of the contender’s own cars that the fill-in team had purchased off them?
Liking both the unexpected and events with personality, I absolutely loved First Night. I can’t remember an evening at Route 66 where I had a better time than I did last Saturday. It had just about everything a person could want in a night at the demos: good races, mind-bogglingly horrible races, one-of-a-kind track conditions that were not helped by the Figure 8 trucks, a fight in the pits, an unexpected winner and the promise of a season-long fight for the championship that could go just about any way imaginable.
What I found most astounding about First Night was the way everything was up for grabs. Last season’s champions, Mean Green Machine, lost to an upstart Full Throttle team; The Locomotives had to use one of Orange Crush’s cars to race Orange Crush… and almost won; The Chicago Hitmen were one of four new teams in the league this year and looked like they’d been racing together for years; and, despite the fact that I was told numerous times at the track that The Locomotives somehow had three cars and two drivers, they gave Orange Crush a scare in the second round.
The team that impressed me the most was unquestionably The Chicago Hitmen. Comprised of Dave “Repo” Swan, “Crazy” Art Scarbro, Levi Turnbaugh and Number 50 (that’s Dave JanJanin!), The Hitmen spent the night with JanJanin running laps and the other three men crushing/blocking. That plan worked to perfection; JanJanin’s race against Full Throttle in the second round was probably the best individual effort I saw on the evening. He cruised through the enormous mountains of mud on the track with absolutely no ill effects and carried the team to its second victory in as many tries. Scarbro, Turnbaugh and Swan did yeoman’s work on the track and kept their opponents on guard and unable to get into any kind of rhythm.
Interestingly though, The Chicago Hitmen didn’t win the night. That honor (somehow) went to Orange Crush. And, while Orange Crush did win the night, the consolation for the rest of the teams in the league is that they looked absolutely wretched in doing so.
As it stands, there are three fill-in teams in the TDA. These are teams with some combination of uncertain rosters, no veteran drivers or strong leadership in place. Those teams are The Sting, The Locomotives and The Crazy 8s. All things considered, it isn’t that big of a deal… unless all three of the fill-in teams somehow ended up on the same side of the bracket. Then it would become an enormous deal. Because, in that scenario, one fill-in team would automatically end up in the second round, meaning that the lone non-fill-in team on that side of the bracket would have the easiest road to the night finals that anyone has had in a long, long time. It would be two gimme races in a row. Orange Crush was the lucky beneficiary of this scheduling quirk and they made the most of it.
How easy was Orange Crush’s path to the finals? None of their first two opponents could even field eight of their own cars to race. As I mentioned previously, Orange Crush had to sell The Locomotives one of their old cars so that The Locomotives would be able to race four cars. If The Locomotives had beaten Orange Crush in the second round, their finals appearance would have had them racing an assortment of four hand-me-down cars from other teams. As far as I know, this has never happened before. Sure there have been fill-in teams racing an assortment of different cars before (First Night, 2009), but to the best of my knowledge, an actual team has never had to race four cars they didn’t build themselves. There wasn’t (or shouldn’t have been) a chance in hell that Orange Crush would lose before the finals.
And yet they almost did.
There’s an old insult about basketball players who can’t shoot. I recall first hearing it when Dennis Rodman played for the Bulls, but it works for any poor shooting player. It goes: Rodman couldn’t hit a shot if he was locked in a gym by himself. It’s not particularly clever or funny, but it does convey the insult nicely. I’d assume there’s a demo equivalent of this joke that would go: FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-TEAM couldn’t win a race if they were on the track by themselves.
Sadly, this is what happened to Orange Crush second round on Saturday.
Orange Crush’s Johnny Ryan (welcome back!) managed to quickly take out two of The Locomotives’ cars with one hit between turn 1 and turn 2. Another Locomotives car driven by Matt Wilson saw Ryan there with the two cars and crashed into him to prevent him from rejoining the fray; Wilson never moved again. In the span of 15 very impressive seconds, with an assist from Elmer Fandrey, Ryan removed three Locomotives’ cars from the race. The only remaining Locomotives’ car was the car that Orange Crush had sold them and it was on its last legs. Orange Crush had both of their runners, Ron Tyrakowski and John Clemmons, still cruising as well as their other crusher, Elmer Fandrey. Somehow, the race went to a countdown.
I’m sure you could argue that track conditions played a part in this and I won’t argue, but that doesn’t make it that much better. Orange Crush had three cars that all died/got stuck without any cars touching them. I think I would have given Orange Crush a pass on this—they did win the night, after all—if it was the first time that this sort of thing had happened to them. However, if you’ll recall, Orange Crush raced an equally poor Damage, Inc. team Fifth Night of 2014 and won in a similar fashion. That’s two races in so many nights against wretched teams that were decided by countdowns because Orange Crush’s cars just stopped going.
One thing Orange Crush does have going for them is that they won in the first round. In one of the more unusual bits of trivia I’ve stumbled onto, in the last ten years of demos, no team that has lost in the first round of First Night has ever gone on to win the championship (h/t to Jason Twite for confirming this).* By this metric, it looks like Full Throttle, The Chicago Hitmen and Orange Crush are going to be battling for the title.
* Twite messaged me with more detailed research. “Since 2001, the only confirmed time a team won a championship and lost first round of First Night was with The Junkyard Dogs in 2003. But that year’s championship was decided after 3 events. The 4th event was the World Finals.”
My own sneaking suspicion is that there is an element of coincidence in this that makes it sound more ominous than it is—championship teams generally do lose in the first round once a season but there’s only a 1 in 5 chance that doing so will happen on First Night—but it’s also hard to argue with the end results. Losing in the first round of First Night definitely puts your back to the wall. Given that there are no super teams this year (save for potentially The Chicago Hitmen), I think that 2015 could well be the year that this change. I for one am looking forward to finding out.