Prior to the beginning of the 2012 TDA season, I wrote a column about my pre-season predictions. Depending on whom you spoke to, I either pulled this list out of my ass or saw it in my ass after I stuck my head there; there are always choices.
More than halfway through the year now, the actual standings, naturally, do not in any way match up with my predictions. Up until about five minutes before I posted the column, I had The Junkyard Dogs in first place and Damage, Inc. in last. Naturally, after three races, The Junkyard Dogs are in dead last, not having won a single race and Damage, Inc. is tied for second, making it to the finals Second Night for the first time in their many year existence. Also worth noting, Reckoning is currently atop the standings, something no one saw coming, a designation that even includes a few drivers on Reckoning itself.
Sticking with the conventional timetable of sports journalism, I decided to go through and list the ten biggest surprises of the TDA’s 2012 year at mid-season.
10 – Mean Green Machine is an All-or-Nothing Team
When racing, Mean Green Machine either wins the night or loses in the first round. That’s it. There’s no in between. They do the absolute best they can, or they do the absolute worst they can. I feel convinced that if they’d been credited with their opening round win against Orange Crush Third Night that they would have gone on to win the night. It’s just the way they roll.
9 – No One Has Been Accused of Cheating
This is truly a jewel in the crown of the new and improved TDA. After three full nights of racing, I haven’t heard one accusation of anyone cheating. I haven’t even heard the usual line about a given team where someone sighs and says, “Well, they must be doing something to their cars!”
More interesting still, now that The Junkyard Dogs started out 0-3, any and all talk about their runner extraordinaire, Ryan Bleuer, hardening his cars’ frames, packing his cars’ cowls with cement and signing away his soul in a deal with the devil in order to get up to 85 miles per hour in the straight-aways has dried up. Frankly, I’m upset at the conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoiacs in the league: don’t they understand that it’s precisely because Bleuer has stopped shoving railroad tracks into his frames and using a back bumper made from depleted uranium that the Dogs are having an off year? C’mon, people!
8 – Seek-N-Destroy’s Greg Mesich is Running Well
Prior to the season, when people looked at Seek-N-Destroy’s lineup the consensus was unanimous: they needed a runner. Three races in, it appears that the consensus was wrong: Seek-N-Destroy has a runner and one who is fairly effective, if albeit unconventional: Greg Mesich.
Mesich tends to fool a lot of people because, unlike the Bleuers, the Gerritt “Big Kahuna” Vanderbilts and the Ron Tyrakowskis of the league, he isn’t a speed demon. He is the tortoise to the other teams’ hares. But, he keeps chugging along and, thus far in the year, in what is proving to be my favorite stat of the season, has more wins than Bleuer, Vanderbilt and Reckoning’s Brian Anderson… combined!
Seek-N-Destroy has only won one race this year so far, but they have been in almost all of them, excluding their race First Night. They raced Reckoning tough—Mesich was in the lead through turn 4 of the last lap—and raced Damage, Inc tough as well Second Night.
The team could potentially use a second runner at times—they seem to run a lot of races with Mesich as the team’s only runner—but this is a far cry from where things were when the season started out.
7 – Mean Green Machine is like a Rosie Perez Quote
In the great Ron Shelton basketball movie, White Men Can’t Jump, actress Rosie Perez famously screeched the following line of dialogue, “Billy, sometimes when you win you really lose and sometimes when you lose you really win!” Well, Mean Green Machine has managed to turn this one utterance into a near way of life. For each of the last three seasons, the men in green have lost races and gone on to race the next round or won races and gone home.
In 2010, they lost to a makeshift team that kind of, sort of looked like Smash, Bash & Crash… but because Smash, Bash & Crash team owner Phil Matlak only could field two cars (neither of which worked), Mean Green Machine moved on to the second round in spite of their loss.
In 2011, they completed less laps than Full Throttle, but due to a scoring error ‘won’ and went on to the second round, ultimately winning the night.
In 2012, they completed more laps than Orange Crush, but due to a scoring error ‘lost’ and Orange Crush went on to the second round and ultimately won the night.
On the plus side, this has allowed me to start asking the following: how good is Orange Crush? They can win a night by going 2-1!
(I think I might start coming up with Orange Crush facts ala Chuck Norris facts. Sliced bread is now called the best thing since Orange Crush!)
6 – Orange Crush’s Tom “Brickman” Lewis and Reckoning’s “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht Have Raced Their Asses Off
Crushers Tom “Brickman” Lewis and “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht have both been racing in the TDA for more than a decade. Both men have won multiple championships and are viewed as truly outstanding competitors. And both men have somehow picked up their games this year to unprecedented heights.
When Bill Simmons writes about basketball players making ‘the leap’, he is inevitably referring to something that happens between their 2nd and 3rd years in the NBA. No professional athletes ever seems to get substantially better after 12 years of playing their sport… except in baseball where such occurrences are usually fueled by steroids.
Lewis is my current pick for the league’s MVP and Vollbrecht right behind him in the number two hole. Watching the two men race is sheer poetry and this year, that has been taken to another level.
5 – Reckoning’s Brian Anderson Doesn’t Have Any Race Wins
It’s not that surprising that The Junkyard Dogs’ Ryan Bleuer or Stranglehold’s Michael Noble don’t have any checkered flags to their names this year as their teams don’t have any wins. What’s unusual about the fact that Reckoning’s Brian Anderson doesn’t have any wins is that he is the lead runner on the first place team that has won more races than any other team in the league. No one is questioning this—Reckoning just keeps on winning—but it is quite surprising nonetheless.
4 – The Scorekeeping Hasn’t Exactly Gotten Better
I’ve talked about this and written about this at length previously, so I’ll keep this short here.
When Full Throttle completed five laps before Mean Green Machine but still “lost” to them in Fourth Night of 2011, it was a tad bit of a black eye for the league. No professional sporting league wants the officials to be deciding who wins and loses, they want the athletes to do that.
There have been 21 races thus far this year and, at bare minimum, 9 of them have had scoreboard issues, 4 of them have been scored wrong or counted incorrectly and in 1 of them, the win was awarded to the wrong team.
With the reinsertion of Cheryl LaPorte into her old role as flag person for Fourth Night, hopefully some of this will change for the better.
3 – Reckoning and Orange Crush Are, Again, Atop the Leaderboard
2012’s Season was supposed to be about parity, about every team having a chance to win and about driving migration evening out the playing field. Well, here we are three races in and Reckoning and Orange Crush, the league’s first and second place finishers for the last two years, have again claimed their spots at the top of the standings. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
2 – The Junkyard Dogs are 0-3
I took a lot of shit for the predictions that I made earlier this year. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d put The Junkyard Dogs in last place, as they are after three races. It’s possible the Internet would have exploded.
What makes The Curious Case of the Junkyard Dogs so interesting is that there isn’t anything that is glaringly wrong about the team as a whole. It certainly isn’t the talent level of the drivers on the team that’s problematic as JYD is filled with two of the best runners in league history, Ryan Bleuer and Gerritt “Big Kahuna” Vanderbilt, a crazy man, know-no-fear crusher in Kyle Shearer and knowledgeable veterans in Brice Martin, Jason Ritacco and Joe Snow.
When they race, it doesn’t necessarily seem like they’re doing anything wrong—Vanderbilt came within literally inches of winning their race against Full Throttle—nor does it seem like they’re suffering from a lot of mechanical failures (at least on the track).
So why are they 0-3? Bad lack? Bad Karma? I have no idea, I just never would have seen this result coming.
1 – Damage, Inc is in Second Place
And I really didn’t see Damage, Inc. doing as well as they are doing.
Historically, Damage, Inc. hasn’t been much of a challenger for the title. For the last nine years, they have finished in 7th, 5th, 7th, 7th, 7th, 6th, 6th, 4th (Hello Robbie Stahulak, Ronnie Johnston and Pete Milette Jr.!) and then 7th again.
In the near past, Damage, Inc. turned in a frightfully bad season in 2011. They were 1-5 and their only win came Fifth Night against Stranglehold in a race where I believe the winning car didn’t complete two full laps. A few weeks before the start of the 2012 season, no one was quite sure who was even on the Damage, Inc. roster besides long-time team owner Dave Swan and Pete Ryan. When the first Damage, Inc. cars hit the pit area on First Night, almost none of them had numbers or any type of sponsors painted on them.
But then a funny thing happened, they started racing and looked really good. Swan was flying around the track, Ryan was causing havoc wherever he went and Kyle “Danger Seeker” Thompson and their rotating cast of fourth drivers (including Andrew Sherman, Rich Wilson, Matt Wilson and Ryan Decker) performed beautifully.
Damage, Inc. has now won an amazing four first round races in a row, more than any team with the notable exception of Reckoning. Second Night, they got to the finals for their first time ever. The most impressive part of Damage, Inc.’s season though has been the way that they have consistently and constantly proved that they belong. This is not a fluke season, this is the way it should be and they look like a team while doing so. And that is great to see. I sincerely hope this keeps up moving forward.