Hudson O’Neal and his K&L Rumley team found themselves in quite a predicament late in their Prairie Dirt Classic Showdown on Friday night where they suffered a flat tire while leading. Hudson and the team had to wrestle with the decision to either come in and change it or stay out and hope to finish the race.
With 6 laps to go, it was clear that O’Neal, who was leading, had a left rear tire going down, but the team chose to stay out on it. Unfortunately, there were two back-to-back cautions for Austin Smith and Dan Ebert that allowed even more air to leak out of the tire. When they finally got going back to green, it was O’Neal who would be the cause of the next caution when the tire eventually as he was ripping the top through turns 3 and 4. He would then collect Jake O’Neil who had nowhere to go.
The team would get the tire fixed and rally for an 8th place finish. That would put O’Neal in a fifth place starting position in Last Chance Showdown 2 on Saturday night. He stormed through the field and was able to win the race and start 18th for the 100-lap Prairie Dirt Classic. He then worked his way through the field for a second place finish behind race winner Brandon Sheppard.
O’Neal spoke about the decision making process following the conclusion of Friday night’s racing telling DIRTVision’s Peyton Williams, “To start off, we don’t really know what cut it down. Had to be a rock, or piece of debris, or something on the race track. But after we had that long green flag run and ended up with six or however much to go and I felt it whenever we stopped, I felt it get a little bit squishy is the word I would use. It kinda walks around on the sidewall and just makes you feel a little odd whenever you’re steering back and forth. But I knew I wasn’t hitting the rim or anything. It wasn’t a rough ride. So I knew that it was just going flat. It wasn’t flat.”
“It was that way for pretty much the whole caution period until about probably two or so, three laps right before we went back green. And I felt it-. It wasn’t consistently riding on the rim, but I could feel it kinda touching the rim like it was getting low enough,” he continued. “I kept looking at my guys and they thought we just needed to keep trying. And they had a better seat than I did. I can’t see the left rear tire. Just unfortunate. I think had we not had so many caution laps we would’ve been able to make it.”
“Just sucks that you have a good night like that and that whenever you have a flat and we would’ve been relegated to restart 20th like we did after. That was kinda going through our minds. Like if we pull in and don’t try to keep going and we get to the tail, there’s not guarantee we’re going to pass anybody,” O’Neal elaborated. “If we run 15th to 20th in one of these features chances are you’re not going to make it tomorrow.”
“Then once we blew the tire we had to come back and we were very fortunate to get back to 8th. Caught a couple good breaks. Had a couple restarts after we went to the tail and had a really fast No. 6 K&L Rumley car. Unfortunate. Felt like we had the car to beat and felt like we were going to win that race and just didn’t quite work out that way. A little adversity never hurt anybody.”
Later in the interview, O’Neal shared more on how he and the team decided to stay out to try to win instead of pitting and attempting a run from the back of the field, “It’s a no-win situation. If we would’ve came in knowing that it wasn’t obviously completely, completely flat, it ended up being completely flat by the end of it, but knowing it wasn’t completely flat and thinking maybe we could’ve made then we would’ve stayed up all night wondering to ourselves if we would have.”
On the opposite end, he said, “And then you try to do it and it blows out and then you rip the deck and everything out of it like we did. So it’s just an unfortunate pairing in the options that we had. Neither one of them were really good, but it turned out okay. Like I said, to get back to 8th was way better than what I thought I would get back to.”
O’Neal is scheduled to compete at the USA Nationals this upcoming weekend at Cedar Lake Speedway with the World of Outlaws Late Models before returning to Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series action at Florence Speedway for the North/South 100 from August 6-8.
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