Bobby East racing news 2010-06-17

Lady Luck Looks East's Way; Finishes Fourth at Tri-City and Second at Berlin

Brownsburg, Ind. (June 14, 2010) -- After three weeks of some of the worst racing luck of his career, Bobby East finally shook the bad vibes and raced his way to a fourth-place finish in the "Kevin Doty Classic" for the USAC National Midget Series at Tri-City Raceway on Friday night and backed it up with a second-place finish in Saturday night's 30-lap USAC Amsoil National Sprint Car feature at Berlin Raceway.

It looked like East's bad luck would continue early in the day at Tri-City when he experienced engine problems during qualifying in his primary car. He was able to withdraw that entry and hop into his backup car, in which he qualified a solid 15th in a huge field of nearly 40 cars. He raced to second in his heat race and stayed in contention all night long to cross the line fourth.

At Berlin, East was strong all evening long in the Klatt Enterprises No. 5 Ford Racing Technology/ClubSport/Beast Chassis Esslinger-Ford Beast. He timed in third fastest in time trials and was second in the third heat. He chased eventual winner Bryan Clausen through the field but ran out of time to run him down to steal the win, settling for second at the stripe.

It was a stark reversal of fortune for East, who has had strong cars in all three USAC national series in recent weeks but has had rotten luck and sour finishes.

"This is a great way to get that monkey off our back," East said. "If you race long enough you go through a streak when nothing you do seems to work out. We haven't changed anything in our preparation at the shop or with the team, but for some reason the past few weeks nothing seemed to work. You just have to ride it out and wait for the tide to turn. We had some bad luck early in the night at Tri-City, but it was actually good luck when it happened. If the engine problems happened in the heat race we would have been done for the night. But we got past that and ended up with a good finish at the end. We were really strong all night long at Berlin but just ran out of laps. Hopefully we've got some momentum to carry us on through Midget Week and then on to the rest of the summer."

East will drive the Klatt Enterprises No. 4 Ford Racing Technology/Beast Chassis/ClubSport Esslinger-Ford Beast in five "Indiana Midget Week" races this week, starting Wednesday at Gas City I-69 Speedway, followed by races at Lincoln Park Speedway, Bloomington Speedway, Lawrenceburg Speedway and the final race of the series-within-a-series on Sunday at Kokomo Speedway.

-source: -BRC-