DAYTONA, FL - It wasn't the Daytona finish Morgan Shepherd and his faithful followers had hoped for after a long winter off-season, but there were many bright spots in Saturday's Camping World 300.
"The main thing is we qualified good, we ran good lap times and we brought our race car home," Shepherd said after piloting the Five-R Trucks and Trailers #89 Chevy to a 39th place finish in the season-opener. "We had some problems, but we battled back and at the end of the day were running times as good or sometimes better than most of the leaders."
After hanging around the low to mid-30s in practice speeds on Wednesday and Thursday, Shepherd turned in the 20th fastest qualifying run on Friday afternoon.
In the early stages of Saturday's race the team held its ground, running from 16th to 32nd place the first 30 or so laps of the contest. That's when the bad of the weekend crept up.
"We missed our pit stall the first time through and had come around again," Shepherd said. "We had a good stop and once I got back up on the track Morris radioed that our right front was cut pretty bad."
Shepherd said the crew called him back to pit road while the race was still under caution and found that the high-pressure water overflow tank had broken away from its mounting and was laying against the front tire.
"We didn't have any choice but to go to the garage and fix it. If it would have let go it would have put water on the tire or cut the tire and put us into the wall. Catching that saved our race car."
While Shepherd lost 28 laps due to the timely repair he spent much of the rest of the race stuck in 43rd place until he was able to pass three cars later in the day that had been damaged in a mid-race crash.
"It wasn't what we had hoped for, but we are thankful for the way the day turned out," he said.
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