It was a big advantage for us especially when you’re fighting over hundreds of a second. “Coolie” was really good at fueling the cars and getting everything he could out of the motor without hurting it. He could usually make the right adjustments to the car and we were doing really well. He could listen to me and understand what I was trying to communicate, he understood what I was trying to tell him and he could just read me right. He was just one of those guys who could look at a car and have a good idea of what it was doing. “Coolie” stepped in really nicely and we had success right off the bat with him. “Coolie” was perfect to fill that role because he wanted to travel and he wanted to race. He didn’t want to be on the Outlaws tour full-time. When they closed down the U2 car it worked out perfectly for us.Īt the time we had my uncle Randy Kinser and he wanted to be home more. Paul McMahan was driving it when I was first starting out, so we travelled around with them a lot, and I knew him from a real young age. When I was just starting out he ran the United Express U2 team which was a pretty popular car back in the Midwest around Indiana and Ohio.
He knew his stuff but he was a really hard read.
The only time he talked was if he had a few beers in him and then you couldn’t get him to be quiet some nights. You never got much out of him, he just never talked much. The rules were quite open and the weight rule was lower. We didn’t have the tire rules that we do today and we could do a lot of different stuff with the wings. We had a Maxim chassis, 87-40 raised rail car at that time. We had a pretty good team, it was about the most I’ve ever had on a team even to this day and we were working good and winning a lot of races together. We had some confidence built up going into the Nationals that we could have success.Īt the time, Mike Cool was my crew chief, Gary Dubois was mechanic and Matt Giese was a mechanic. We’d had quite a few wins, our motors were hitting good, our cars were feeling great and I was driving really well. So, things were rolling pretty good for us. We had won six or seven Outlaws races leading up to the Nationals and had actually won the first night of the spring race at Knoxville before the second night rained out. Heading into Knoxville we were having a great year. We were pretty happy going into Saturday night’s show. It actually ended up being a pretty good night and we’d had two solid nights at Knoxville in general. We really didn’t do much in the feature, we just kind of maintained at eighth place, but it was enough to get us pretty good points. When all was said and done it helped us because we qualified third the next night and this time we finished third and made the feature straight through our heat race. I was kinda bummed because we were actually gonna be pretty good in points as long as we got through the B-main. We started in the first two rows of the B-main, but we never got to run the B-main because it rained out at that point. We had missed the show through our heat race by one spot.
It was a rainy weekend in general.Īt first, I thought the first night getting rained out was going to hurt us because we had qualified like second or third quick. Our initial preliminary night was rained out. We actually had two preliminary nights at the 2005 Knoxville Nationals.
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