Imagine being behind the wheel of a racing car running wheel-to-wheel with your competition and suddenly everything goes dark. Gene Woods and the other competitors in the NASCAR Grand National Western Division Dodge Country/Havoline/NAPA Auto Parts 200 at Stockton 99 Speedway last Saturday night didn’t have to imagine it, it actually happened as in the middle of the race the track lights suddenly went out, plunging the speedway into total darkness and creating a mess Woods was lucky to escape from with repairable damage to the Monster Energy Drinks/Circle K Food Stores/Dodge Intrepid to ultimately score his best finish of the season.
"We were very tight in qualifying and qualified 17th." Woods said. "We were in the top ten about 60 laps into the race when the light all went out. Yes, a power outage in Stockton. Everything went completely black but I got the car stopped without hitting anything. But then we got slammed from behind.
"The race was red flagged for about 20 minutes until they restored the power (a transformer near the racetrack reportedly blew) and they let us fix the cars. It almost tore the rear end right out, right rear wheel off, bent the truck arm, etc. The crew worked great to get us back into the race and after the restart we worked our way into fifth place and stayed there until 10 laps to go. With the leaders in sight the right rear tire was going down and the car spun very violently off of turn two. The yellow never came out.
"The real bummer was there were only six of us on the lead lap and once we got turned back around we almost caught the guys that were fifth, sixth and seventh but wound up eighth and the Monster car was beat up to boot! But the good news is that we are now only five points out of the top ten, that’s two positions we gained, and the next race is in Utah and we’ve been fast there."
