[i (Bill W) August 18, 2009]
Brandon Wimmer has had better weeks, but much can be chalked up to good old “Mother Nature”. The Knoxville Nationals seems to attract some kind of weather, and this year was no different. The timing was bad for the driver from Fairmount, Indiana and the Alan Barton #7TW team. This weekend, he’ll pilot the Rick Ferkel #0 at Attica Raceway Park in Ohio on Saturday.
The week actually started a week ago Monday at the Front Row Challenge at the Southern Iowa Speedway in Oskaloosa. Brandon stuffed the #0 in the heat race with nowhere to go. “Ryan Bunton lost his driveline right in front of us,” he says. “He got sideways and I drove right into the side of him. Once I hit him, the car came down and the front axle was gone, sending me straight into the wall. That was the end of that night and that car.”
Things looked bright for Brandon at Knoxville on Wednesday when he drew one of the first pills for qualifying. Then the rain came causing a delay over four hours. “We finally drew a good number after struggling all year, and it rains on us,” he says. “It didn’t kill us, but it hurt us pretty bad. The guys who came out late seemed to have the better times for the most part.”
Brandon made the most of it, running second in his heat and transferring to the main event. “We qualified pretty badly, and that kind of set the tone for our Nationals,” he says. “The rain kind of made us a victim of the track. It was good to start up front and make the A in the heat, but we were already behind quite a few points from qualifying.”
Brandon finished where he started (16th), like most drivers on the super-fast narrow track. “There just wasn’t anywhere to go,” he laments. “You’d run up on someone, but there wouldn’t be any way around them unless they made a mistake.”
Through it all, Brandon was able to put himself in the cut of the top 50 cars. He lined up fifth for Friday’s C Scramble. “We tried some setup stuff on Friday,” he says. “We tried some reverse stuff in the rear, that some guys who run Knoxville do, and it didn’t work for us. The track was good. We didn’t get a good start, and fell back to seventh. We stayed there the whole race.”
Rain was back on Saturday night. A one hour rain delay halted things during the B main. Wayne Johnson won the C in record time, and just like Wednesday, Brandon finished where he started (9th). “After the rain delay, we were a victim of the rain again,” he says. “We just finished where we started. It’s no one’s fault. You can’t control Mother Nature. That’s just the way it was. It affected a lot of guys, and there were good drivers we finished ahead of.”
It was a rough week. “We had been so close to making the A the last few years, it was just disappointing,” says Brandon. “We hoped to be better, but we were a victim of the circumstances a little bit. You can’t get too down about that.”
Brandon is now a member of Team Mannatech and participated in an autograph session on Friday conducted to educate people on their fine wellness products. “It was great,” he says. “A lot of people stopped by, especially later on. Hopefully, we got the message out about Team Mannatech.”
Brandon and Rick Ferkel would like to thank the following sponsors for all their help: Shorty’s Truck Repair, Smith’s Farm, Goodyear Tires, Griff’s Engines, Kear’s Speed Shop, Huggins Cams, BRODIX Heads, Barnes Oil Pumps, Prism Lubricants, Zeis Land Development, Butlerbuilt, Simpson, Winning With Wellness and WRT Web Designs.
[b Brandon at Knoxville (Mike Campbell Photo)]
- Bill Wright on Aug 18, 2009
- Article Date: 8/18/2009