03.Oct.08 - As published on www.sprintcardaily.com

Reed returns from TPCR with sore feet!
 

Lead driver of the Westside Honda sprintcar team, Matthew Reed, returned to Tyrepower Parramatta City Raceway last Saturday night to take on the might of the Parramatta Posse. He endured a night of mixed fortunes, with the end result not quite what the team were looking for. Matt explains it as follows...

"We actually were not sure whether to go to Adelaide for the Masters or back to PCR, and I waited right up until Friday to decide. We were at PCR the previous meeting when Scott Darley lost his life in a horrible crash, and the events of that night have really upset me.

Throughout my whole career I’ve been fortunate enough to have never witnessed anyone die at the racetrack, and after watching Scott’s crash I have really struggled to come to terms with it. And I had never even met the guy. But just to have been there and seen the crash, and to see the pain on everyone’s faces with people crying is something that will stay with me for a very long time. I thought about quitting the whole deal, which I’m sure a lot of people did. But after talking to some people I decided to press on, and in order to move forward I felt I needed to go back to Parramatta.

It was a pretty tough thing to do for me, and it must have been awful hard for his family and all the local guys up there. What I found tough was firing the car the very first time. You sit there waiting for a push truck to come round, and you are looking down the front straight. And the very first thing you see on the right side is the wall that claimed Scott’s life last time we was here. You have to drive right past that section before you even get onto the track, and it was not easy.

Talking to people like Garry Coleman and some of my friends up there we share the view that if we openly talk about the incident rather than try to hide it, it can help us move forward, so I hope no one thinks poorly of me by me writing this.

We got off to a pretty average start to be honest with a poor qualifying effort however we made a nice run through both our heats, taking a win and a second from our third row starting positions, giving us an A main start out of position 8. I figured I needed to have the car pretty free to be able to move around and pass cars if I wanted to work my way toward to front, and I felt that with the way the track was, we would be up against the cushion or over it for the most part of the race.

We got rolling around ready to start and I could see the guys up on the front row crowding each other and rubbing wheels, which I thought was pretty dumb. These guys have 22 cars right behind them and 30 laps of racing in front of them to get the job done, and it worries me when you see that cause it’s usually the first sign of a mess about to happen.

Sure enough the first attempt at a start was aborted as someone up near the front climbed up over someone else and poo just happened. I think a guy spun out at the other end of the track too. We lost a couple cars from my row and it allowed me to move up at the restart. We seemed to roll around for quite a while and I spent these laps trying to knock down the evilness of the cushion.

We finally got racin and I started working my way around the top side of the track, with all 4 wheels over the cushion. We passed some cars and after a few laps we hit the lead. And up until the 21^{st lap that is where we stayed. I was gassing it up around the top of the track doing my best Garry Brazier impersonation. We were rarely in clean air, and the lapped traffic was heavy.}

After so many green flag laps I could see that the cushion was getting pretty decent in turn 2, and I was trying my best to avoid hitting it. I was trying to enter the turn above the cushion way up on the edge, so that on the exit I could drive down the track and not slide up into the lumps of clay and bang the car into it. I actually dropped my right rear over the edge of the track a couple times getting into turn 1, because I couldn’t see the where the edge of the track was. I was getting absolutely covered in mud from the lapped cars and a few times I was going that fast at the end of the straight I was too damn scared to take my hand off the wheel to pull a tear-off.

In hindsight I should have maybe moved down and rolled around the bottom, hoping I had built enough of a lead, which from all reports I had. But I hate driving around the bottom. To run the bottom you usually need to use the brake, and that means using both feet. That’s like twice as much work for the driver.

When you are working through the lapped cars, you sorta drive up into the corner and need to wait a split second to try to figure out which way they are gonna go. Then after you guess what way they are headed you try to go somewhere they are not in order to get passed them. I guessed wrong on a couple of guys, and found myself in the middle of the track, and I knew I might be in trouble on the exit. Sure enough we caught the cushion big time on the exit, and it turned me hard right instantly.

I tried to correct it but by that time I had flown over the edge of the track and the car was spinning backwards towards the wall. To be totally honest, it scared the crap out of me, because the car seemed to suddenly get going faster after it left the track, and I had no control where I was gonna land. I braced myself for a big hit into the wall backwards, but I was relieved when it got into the new tyre wall because it absorbed all of the speed out of the impact. The car stalled, and about then I started to realize that my efforts had amounted to zero.

We restarted at the tail and ran the last 10 laps, passing a few more cars and eventually finishing in 9th place, which was bitterly disappointing. As a driver, everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and I’m not sure whether a track with a big heavy cushion is exactly one my strengths. I feel I’m getting better at it, but I still got some learning to do. Most of our local tracks around Victoria don’t build a cushion anything like what you see at Parramatta, so I don’t get much experience with those types of tracks.

To win a race anywhere is hard, but to win one at Parramatta is really tough. We don’t get to race up there much so we don’t get many chances, and to throw away one like that is gonna burn me up for a long time. We won a race there back in 2004, but I really want to win another one there. I have the utmost respect for all the guys that race up there, because the place is so tough. It’s tough because there are so many cars. It’s tough because the quality of the cars and drivers is so high. And it’s tough because the track can be brutal at times.

Naturally my crew, Peter & Jason, were bitterly disappointed. We loaded up and started to head home, and once we got out on the highway past Campbelltown where it all gets dark Pete pulled the truck over and demanded I get out. The guys had decided that since the driver had made such a chronic screw-up it would only be fair to make him walk home. Jason actually wanted to tie a rope to the back of the truck and drag my ass down the highway, but Pete said that was maybe taking it a bit far.

I would have had this release up earlier but it’s taken me until Monday night to get home. And yes, my feet are sore and hurt like hell.

Maybe that’s a little exaggeration of the truth, but Mum always tells me don’t ever let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Oh, and by the way, we ran our opening night at Avalon a few weeks back. I was pretty sick all week with the flu, and drove like a lazy ass.

We bought our Westside Honda / Workplace Safety Wear Maxim home in third place, but I just didn’t have the energy to get up on the wheel and have a go. Some kid by the name of Loudoun came down from Sydney and smashed the track record in qualifying and simply drove off into the distance to win the feature. He literally arrived at the track, pulled our pants down, spanked our asses and then yanked them back up and gave us a big wedgie, then drove back up the highway with the money.

Apparently he’s just some local guy from Parramatta…."