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(Bill W) September 23, 2010 – Brian Brown was able to spend some quality time with Factory Motor Parts employees last weekend. Unfortunately, despite having a fast car, the results on the track with the World of Outlaws were forgettable. The Grain Valley, Missouri driver will try to right the FVP #21 this weekend in shows in Jacksonville, Illinois and Wheatland, Missouri.
A race Saturday night at Deer Creek Speedway near Spring Valley, Minnesota is the closest Brian will get on his racing schedule to the Mother Ship. “Deer Creek Speedway is probably and hour or hour and a half from Factory Motor Parts headquarters,” he says. “They own FVP, Superclean and Splash. They had 150-200 employees and customers there, which was great. Some of those people hadn’t probably been to a sprint car race before. To be able to give them tours and have some BBQ was great. We wouldn’t be able to do what we are doing without FVP, and it was our small way of saying ‘Thank you’.”
The weekend started Friday at the Clay Count Fair Speedway in Spencer, Iowa. Brian qualified for the dash and started ninth in the feature. “We were quick in hot laps…unfortunately, that was the highlight of the night. We just seemed to struggle all night long. We couldn’t get the car balanced.”
He would end with a DNF after some contact with Joey Saldana. “I was running eleventh or twelfth in the feature there, and Joey cut across the front of me,” he says. “I tried to get back underneath him, and spun it. That would be the story of the whole weekend. I think we usually spin three times in a year, but we spun three times in one weekend. The one on Friday probably couldn’t be avoided, but the ones on Saturday probably could have.”
Things started well at Deer Creek on Saturday. “We were pretty decent, qualifying twelfth and winning the heat race pretty easily,” says Brian. “We started ninth in the dash and were running eighth until the last corner of the last lap.”
Two spins would result in a 16th place finish. “We were battling with Sam Hafertepe Jr. there for eighth on the third or fourth lap,” says Brian. “It was really slick and the motor was stumbling a bit in the mid-range. I went to slide Sam and I spun the tires and couldn’t catch it.”
He would come back through the pack, only to suffer the same result. “We were able to drive back to ninth or tenth,” he says. “I felt we had a fifth-eighth place car at that point, but we ended up spinning again. It was definitely embarrassing. Fortunately, the best drivers were there, and no one hit me. I think we passed the most cars that night, but unfortunately, the driver made some mistakes.”
This Friday night, Brian will bring the 410 to Jacksonville Speedway in Illinois for the “Shaheen’s Blast from the Past”. “From what I hear, Bobby Hawks has done a great job with the facility,” says Brian. “Jacksonville, Illinois, from the time I remember as a little kid, has been a 410 sprint car town. It seems it’s getting back to that, definitely. We’d like to win a prestigious race like the ‘Shaheen’, and reward a couple of our partners there in the Jacksonville area. We don’t get to race there very often, so we want to do well. The competition will be stiff, and we’ll do our best.”
Brian will be close to home on Saturday night with the Lucas Oil ASCS National Series at the Lucas Oil Speedway near Wheatland. “Wheatland has been good to us,” he says. “We’ve been able to win there, and last year we had a solid third. It’s probably the nicest facility we go to all year long. It’s really close to a lot of our great partners like Champion Brands, Impact Sign & Lighting and Ditzfeld Transfer. We’d like to think we’ll be in the hunt to win that deal and defend our home turf.”
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