If you ask Scott Raney, it's been a frustrating season. As crew chief for the U-37 Beacon Plumbing, he watched a winter's worth of hard work go up in smoke when the boat did a full 360-degree flip in Evansville, Ind. in its second heat of racing for the year.
Fortunately, the boat wasn't severely damaged and most importantly, driver Jean Theoret escaped without injury. But one of the team's carefully tuned motors was damaged. It was the beginning of a long season.
"It's just been a battle. Last year, everything just seemed to fall into place and everything was good and happy. We really didn't hurt much," he said. "This year it's just been a struggle. It's been a fight."
The team broke another motor in Madison, then lost its third and final good engine in Detroit after a gearbox failure.
"We've gone years without breaking anything," he lamented. "It wasn't the engines' fault, it was systems associated with and around them that caused that to happen."
It's a stark contrast to the 2006 campaign, which also started with a flip in Evansville. That was about the only miscue on the way to a strong performance and a win in Detroit's prestigious Gold Cup. This year, their motor stock was so decimated that they could do little more than put a few motors together from parts and try to run, knowing they were down on power and short on spares.
The time off between Detroit and Tri-Cities was a time to regroup for the Beacon Plumbing team - but not enough to truly rebuild three motors, dyno test them and get them into pre-season shape. Raney is stoic about the prospects.
"In the week and a half off, we've had to build some new parts. John Walters and Aaron Demark and myself and some of the guys in the shop really worked a lot of hours putting some stuff together. We're going to go find out how it does here pretty quick."
The team will have to recover quickly in order to come even close to last year, when they went on to win the races in Seattle and San Diego. Even so, Raney agrees that their first half of the season could have been far worse.
"The boat part of the program came out great," he said. "It survived the accident in Evansville and just the general racing part of what happened back east. It's just the engine program, which has been a strong point of our team that has some issues. We're just going to sort through them and make it better."
Raney and the U-37 bounced back later in the day to qualify at 158.599, the third-fastest speed in the first day of qualifying. They'll put their race prospects to the test on Saturday and Sunday in search of their first Columbia Cup, on a course that the team traditionally has had bad luck at.