Did anyone actually believe after Chicago’s so-called off weekend that KB Titan Racing was suddenly slipping?
On Friday at Maryland International Raceway, Greg Anderson delivered a reminder about the danger of assumptions.
One week after a weekend Anderson openly described as mistake-filled, the six-time Pro Stock champion put his HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Camaro on top of the qualifying sheet with a 6.494-second pass at 211.79 mph, leading a KB Titan charge that quickly reestablished itself as the class benchmark.
If Chicago was supposed to be evidence of decline, nobody seemed to tell Anderson.
Joining him near the top was points leader Dallas Glenn, who narrowly missed the provisional pole with a 6.497 at 211.26 mph. Matt Latino ended Friday third with a 6.504 at 212.56 mph.
For a team that spent the week hearing questions after a runner-up finish and a rare stumble in Chicago, Maryland looked much more familiar.
Anderson looked familiar, too. The irony is that he arrived at Maryland International Raceway with almost no useful data.Twenty-five-year-old notes weren’t going to help.
“We’ve raced here before. We’ve run here before. I’ve tested here before, but that’s 25 years ago so we don’t keep the database that far back,” Anderson said. “We should have obviously, but we didn’t and start over.
“So we came out the first run and we made pretty good guesses, I think. And obviously we learned a lot the first run.”
The first guess turned out to be pretty good. The second one wasn’t.
Like much of the Pro Stock field, Anderson and KB Titan assumed the track would lose some grip during the second qualifying session as temperatures increased. Instead, the racetrack improved.
Anderson went the wrong direction while much of the field moved forward. Rather than sounding frustrated, he sounded pleased.That’s usually a bad sign for everyone else with PROÂ on the windshield.
“Obviously, we learned a lot the first run,” Anderson said. “We came back the second run and we all just assumed since it got a little bit hotter out there, a little bit warmer, racetrack got a little hotter, probably wasn’t going to be quite as good.
“So just kind of a throwaway run. Didn’t figure you could run low. So we made a few changes to the car thinking the track would lose a little grip and it gained grip.”
The mistake provided something Anderson values almost as much as performance. It provided information.
“So the racetrack got better,” Anderson said. “So you saw a lot more cars made quality runs the second run all except for me. We went the wrong way, but that’s good intel. And now we know what to do tomorrow.”
That’s probably not what the rest of the Pro Stock field wanted to hear.
Maryland’s conditions didn’t hurt, either. For naturally aspirated Pro Stock racers, tracks near sea level are the equivalent of finding money in an old jacket pocket. Anderson wasn’t shy about his affection for what he found Friday.
“It’s great. It’s cool. For Pro Stock cars we love going to racetracks that have a big barometer or basically sea level type tracks because we don’t have a blower. We don’t have any type of power adder. We don’t have a turbo. We have nothing,” Anderson said.
“We’re dependent on Mother Nature. So we hope and pray we get races somewhere through the season that have conditions like this. So these are fantastic conditions. They’re basically Disneyland conditions.”
Anderson believes Friday was only the beginning. The weather forecast, combined with what teams learned during qualifying, could make Saturday one of the quickest Pro Stock sessions of the season.
“You’ll see the cars all run faster tomorrow yet,” Anderson said. “Now that we know what the racetrack is like, the air’s already better than what we ran today.
“Now we know the racetrack will go along with it. So we should all be able to pick up tomorrow and you should see a lot of 640 runs tomorrow. I’m going to predict that.”
For Pro Stock racers, that’s about as close as it gets to Christmas morning.
Anderson’s connection to Maryland International Raceway goes back much further than this weekend. Long before he became a six-time world champion, he made trips to Budds Creek while working as crew chief for Warren Johnson.
The memories remain at the front of his mind.
“So many times coming here back when I worked with Warren Johnson as a crew chief and we’d come up here and we’d race, I think it was the Wednesday night before Englishtown,” Anderson said.
“Every year we’d come here for a match race or for a money race, big money race and the grandstands would be packed and people are betting on their race cars. It’s just a great atmosphere.”
What Anderson found Friday looked familiar. The faces may be older but he enthusiasm hasn’t.
“It’s a lot of the same people that were here back then, 20 some years ago are here again,” Anderson said. “So it’s pretty doggone cool and people up here, they love Pro Stock.
“The Pro Stock is absolutely an East Coast class for some reason, but people up the East Coast love Pro Stock.”
Chicago still lingered in the conversation but not because Anderson wanted to talk about it, but because everyone else did. He wasn’t interested in excuses.
“We definitely made a lot of mistakes at Chicago and it was well-rounded,” Anderson said. “It was mostly look in the mirror and blame myself, but there was a few other mistakes made too.
“I took the bulk of the blame.”
The lesson followed him to Maryland.
“I came here saying I do not want to experiment,” Anderson said. “We’re going to be on focus all three days here trying to win the race, trying to run as best we can every run.”
