Eric is awesome! Here's our story. Lugo Racing #1468 was at the 2016RATR this weekend. we have had a string of DNFs and we were looking forward to a good run. We went out on the Saturday 3-lap Pre-run which started early. Everything went well until the very end of third lap. Wayne hit a boulder and the right I-beam snapped in two. We pretty much figured our weekend was already done, how would we get something like that fixed? Mark Newhan told us to try to find Eric from Finish Line Certified Welding. All I knew was to look for a silver Dodge truck with a welder on it. We found him and let him know that we were looking for some material to insert into the I-beam tube, and if we could find it, we would like it if he could weld it up. He said no problem. Nick Isenhouer (#1405, another racer in our class) graciously gave us the necessary material. By the time we got the I-beam parts off the truck and over to Eric we had about an hour until the scheduled start of our heat. We got to Eric's truck but he wasn't there. I called him on the phone and said that we had the parts ready. He had just gone to the hot pits to support his own team, but said, no problem and came right over. He is a MASTER on-the-spot repair fabricator. we got the part put together, he did a BEAUTIFUL weld job and we were able to get the truck back together and to the starting line with minutes to spare. We started in about the 30th position in a field of about 35 and worked our way up to 5th for the day. Sunday we got a clean start at the front of the field and wound up winning the heat for the day, missing the win for the weekend by 4 seconds to Kevin Thompson, #1470 (based on unofficial results). Nick Isenhouer ran right behind us all day on Sunday, keeping the pressure on. The I-beam stayed together nicely and we had a great run.
Thanks to Eric and Nick for making our weekend happen. We would have gone home early without you guys!
PT
