Racing With Jesus – Kentucky

Disaster in the Bluegrass State

From Faith Motorsports PR:

SPARTA, KY – Sporting a brand new Dodge engine for the Meijer 300 at Kentucky Speedway, Morgan Shepherd and his Faith Motorsports crew had high hopes for a solid finish amoungst a field of Nationwide Series regulars.

But, just after taking the green flag in qualifying something major went amiss under the hood. Shepherd cut power to the Ernie Elliott engine and coasted to the garage using a provisional starting pass to make the race field.

“Any other time we could of hurried up and changed out engines, but because of the engine problems we had last week we had to put our spare engine in the backup car and send the Nashville engine back to the engine shop,” Shepherd said. “We had 90 minutes to have the car on the starting grid and there was no way we could pull a motor from the backup car and pull the motor from the primary car and get everything switched over and put back together in time.”

Because the car had not been wrecked during the qualifying lap, NASCAR would not permit the use of the backup car, but would allow the team to change motors if they felt they could get the car on the starting grid on time.

“We would have been taking a major, major chance of trying to get the engine switched and on the grid on time. If we would not have gotten the car on the grid we would have been given a pre-race withdraw and not allowed to start.”

The only other option for the team was to do what it could to the primary engine and hope for the best.

The engine had spun off the belts during the qualifying run, but all of the pulleys seemed secure. After reappling all of the belts and checking over everything possible without taking a look in the bottom end of the motor, the team pushed the car to the starting grid.

“When they gave the command to fire the engines the crank shaft broke right in two,” Shepherd said. “Those are things you can’t see. It probably bent during qualiying and then the pressure broke it when we fired the engine up.”

Shepherd said he was confident the engine would not have lasted long under green, but without a backup engine with the same mounting configuration ready to change out, the team was in a position of not having any other choice.

“Now we are in a major bind getting ready for Milwaukee. I don’t know at this point what we are going to be able to do so we hope to get something put together this week that will run us until we get some of the engines back from the builder.”

On a positive note, Morgan Shepherd was featured in articles published by two national magazines this week.

The AARP Bulletin published an article entitled Living on a Prayer with a focus on Morgan Shepherd. You can view the full article here.

The 2nd article was published by the Pentacostal Evangel and can be viewed here.

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You can follow the inspiring story of this team and read more about Morgan Shepherd and Racing with Jesus at the team’s website – www.racewithfaith.com. In addition to the team’s site, Jeff Parnell of KingdomWinners.com is writing a weekly blog of the team’s exploits at Christian Business Daily.

Read more of this inspiring story

….. to be continued…..