The regular season finale in Kansas usually has 2 types of competitors, I’m locked in so I’m taking it easy or I’m trying to gains points so I’m going for broke.
Thomas “Moose” Praytor and his DK-LOK/Randy Patrick Wears Pink Ford were locked in to 7th place in the Championship just by starting the race. But the team took a totally different approach to Friday night’s ARCA Series finale.
“We’ve been working on the handling of ours cars all year and instead of sitting back our guys spent hours making wholesale changes to our car. We never give up.”
Off the trailer the team was really disappointed with the speed of the Ford and spotter Tab Boyd quickly put the whip to the driver.
“Tab was on me from the moment I hit the track he was almost as bad as my regular spotter. After a couple of rounds my Dad came over to the window and said something like, “Hey you dumb ___ I know you don’t listen to me but you got one of the best spotters in the business on the roof you should listen to him!” I had to change a lot of my driving style but it paid off”.
While the Moose was working inside the car the team was working outside the car and the final lap of practice was his fastest. Out for qualifying Praytor picked up a couple of more 10ths for the new fastest lap of the day.
“A long 2 hour practice session really gave us time to work on a lot of different areas of the car and it really paid off. Of course the extra weight of the Randy Patrick Wears Pink stickers slowed us down! (Laughing)”
After the wreck fest of the last few races the season finale turned into one of the cleanest of the year with few cautions and some great racing. The team and Praytor continued to work on Betty every lap and every caution trying to send her out on a good note. Betty and the Moose turned their fastest laps of the weekend in the closing stages of the race. Praytor started the night 22nd and finished 20th.
“My guys kept working all night on making us better and it paid off. A lot of people would have phoned the last race in but we are always working on new ideas trying to improve our race team. We think we hit on a few things that really brought our DK-LOK/Randy Patrick Wears Pink Ford to life over the course of practice, qualifying and the race. Cant thank Tab enough for coming over and helping us again. Congratulations to Selfie on his first win and Austin and the entire Schrader bunch on the Championship, they really had a great year. Gonna miss Black Betty next year but we have a lot of cool stuff coming up.”