By DAVID MILLER
Special to The Dispatch
It’s impossible for someone who doesn’t race cars or work on them to understand the geometry, physics and engineering that go into building a car and adjusting it to achieve the perfect balance of speed and control.
Sometimes that’s the case for drivers, who, depending on their equipment and help around them, can function with baseline knowledge of how to prepare the car each week. That was the case for Hunter Carroll, who had his best year in a late model in 2016, finishing just four points behind Jeremy Shaw in the NeSmith Crate Late Model track points championship at Magnolia Motor Speedway.
Carroll, 23, pilots the No. 147 Track Star car and has been racing late models for nearly nine years. But it wasn’t until this offseason that he truly “got on top” of everything.
“We took it all apart and rebuilt it to have a note of everything,” Carroll said. “[For example] where our ‘roll-center’ was on the car – that’s where you heaviest point is on the car and where it will pivot at in the center of the car. So we learned how it measures and how to get that measurement. I never knew where any of that was on any of my other cars.”
Carroll hopes to apply a winter’s worth of notes and adjustments at Magnolia Motor Speedway on Saturday, when the track opens its 2017 schedule with the USCS Frost Buster 150, a loaded slate of races including USCS sprint cars, Super Late Models and NeSmith Late Models, among others.
Saturday will mark the first time Carroll has been at Magnolia since finishing 15th in the Possum Town Grand Prix in November. But he’s been busy of late. The Steens native has raced at five different tracks in the last two weeks, including stops at both Columbus Speedway and Whynot Motorsports Park on Saturday.
“After our feature at Columbus, all we did was change the gear, loaded up and hit the road,” Carroll said. “We hit the track just in time for the heat race, started from the rear and got to sixth. We started 18th in the feature and finished 10th. I had a top five car that night … just got hung up too much.”
Carroll followed that with a runner-up finish Sunday at Greenville.
“I have a winning car now,” Carroll said.
The adjustments on the No. 147 weren’t wholesale; instead, Carroll said he focused more on the front end of the car, particularly the caster and camber in the right front.
The offseason and last few weeks have been an experimental phase for not just Carroll, but also his friends who’ve helped him learn about his car. Justin Carter, Billy Tedford and Mark Stokes all race late models and have had an influence on Carroll’s program, he said.
“I have some good friends,” Carroll said. “I knew a little bit about the car, but I didn’t know where to start to figure all this stuff out. They have way more knowledge than me when it comes to that stuff, but we’re all open-minded. We all come up with something, one of us will try it, and if we like it, someone else will try it.”
While Carroll has increased his knowledge of the car and how it functions, his approach from track to track will remain the same – instead of making significant changes each week, he’s aiming to find a base setup that will require minor changes, like a gear or a spring.
“If you unload and are fast off the truck, you’re fast all weekend,” Carroll said. “If you’re chasing the track all weekend, you won’t finish well.”
Carroll doesn’t plan to compete for a points title at either Columbus or Magnolia and plans to hit the road for more races.
“It’d be good to follow NeSmith points, but that’ll be tough,” Carroll said. “I might have to skip a couple of weeks at home to go out of town because (racing different tracks) is what makes you better.”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.