Rich Bickle had a frustrating night finishing 15th in the 29th-Annual Miller Lite Nationals at Slinger Super Speedway Tuesday. The three-time Nationals titlest saw his chances of a record-tying fourth championship in the prestigious super late model event go up in smoke when he was crashed out of the 200-lap event on the 150th circuit.
"Rich Loch came off of Turn 2 and bounced off the outside back stretch wall," said Bickle. "Then he went into Turn 3 and got loose. I tried to drive under him and he cut right down from the outside groove to the bottom of the track. He hit my right front tire with his door bars and got sideways. Instead of driving out of it, he drove right over the front of my car. That was it for us. We were done. It's a shame. We had a good car. I'm not sure we would have won, but we were way better than Kyle Busch and he finished fourth."
Bickle's black No. 45 Perlick Chevrolet Monte Carlo was strong from the start timing in 10th-fastest in the 24-car starting field. According to the veteran Edgerton, WI driver, this year's Nationals competition was tough as ever.
"The third-place qualifier ran an 11.503 and we ran and 11.544, so there was only four one-hundredths of a second between third and 10th in qualifying," said Bickle. "That's as tight as it can get."
Bickle set sail toward the front at the drop of the green flag in a field that featured NASCAR stars Matt Kenseth, Kyle Busch, David Stremme, Kelly Bires and Erik Darnell.
"We started the race pretty good, but the left-rear bleeder didn't work and the left-rear tire shrunk way down," Bickle stated. "We wound up having more than five inches of stagger and the car was so loose I could hardly drive it."
Bickle soldiered on to complete the first 100-lap segment before making adjustments during a mandatory half-time break pit stop. Now back underway and running strong in the sixth position, the 1992, 1996 and 2003 Nationals champion saw his chances for a fourth title crushed in the incident with Loch on Lap 150.
Kenseth wound up winning the race - his fourth Nationals title equaling the all-time win mark set by Dick Trickle, Joe Shear and Lowell Bennett - with Jeremy Lepak, Dennis Prunty, Busch and Nick Schumacher completing the top-five finishers.
Afterward, Bickle also had some thoughts about the condition of the Slinger quarter-mile racing surface.
"It's hard enough to race at Slinger and this time they didn't put that track tack stuff down in the outside groove like they usually do," said Bickle. "When they do that, they have some of the greatest short track racing in the country. I guess they were just too cheap to put that down this time to give us an outside grove to race in. It only costs $1,500 to put it down and it lasts for six weeks. They charged $50 to $100 to get in the pits and $26 to sit on the hill. The place was packed. It wasn't like they couldn't afford it.
"To make things worse, they decided to do double-file restarts after the cautions," Bickle continued. "Since there wasn't an outside groove, every time you got stuck on the outside on a restart, you went straight to the back. You had to fight your way to the bottom and be a bottom feeder all night long to get anywhere. I'm more upset for the fans than anything. It was a good race and Matt did come from the back to win, but its unfortunate they wouldn't put the stuff down on the track to make it a great show. The fans deserved to see better than what they saw."
Bickle hopes both he and the fans will fare better when he next takes to the track in a 150-lap American Speed Association (ASA) Midwest Late Model Tour race at Wisconsin International Raceway on Tuesday, August 5.
