Tyler Carpenter was one of the favorites heading into last weekend’s Country Roads 100 at Tyler County Speedway with the United Late Model Series.
Any time a there’s a big late model race in and around West Virginia, Carpenter is one of the favorites, but he put an exclamation point on it for the Country Roads 100 when he won the 30-lap Country Roads preliminary on Saturday night. He then followed that up with an eighth-place qualifying run in Group A, a second place heat race finish, and a fifth place starting spot for Sunday night.
However, the feature did not turn out the way Carpenter was hoping. He failed to finish the race and ended up in 20th. Carpenter pulled his car into the infield after he smacked the wall two laps in a row.
First, while he was battling for 10th with Joe Martin, he smacked the wall at the exit of turn 2. He was able to get the car back underneath him and continued on. A lap later while he was ripping the top of the track with Martin underneath him and he hit the wall exiting turn 4 coming down the front stretch. The next lap, around lap 55 or so, he pulled his car into the infield after he exited turn 4. He did not return to the race.
In a post to Facebook, Carpenter shared what went wrong that caused him to DNF. He wrote, “I honestly thought we just completely missed the setup and flat-out sucked 
… but after getting everything back to the shop and going over it, we ended up finding the real problem.”
In the video, he said this, “Show you what we did find out though. Check this out. I think that’s why we sucked. Obviously, guys like Matt and them didn’t catch it when we was changing tires. So second half was short-lived. About 5 or 10 lap shootout and I said, ‘We sucked. We just missed the setup.’ And then Bubba Shrimp said, ‘No, dad, lookie there.’ Broke that rod.”
The rod in question is the control arm for a 4-link suspension, or the lower trailing arm, or lower radius rod. It holds the rear end in place.
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