Andy Seuss and Team Keep Digging at Speedweeks 2007

What a difference a year makes. In 2006, Andy Seuss and his team of family and friends left Florida Speedweeks as the underdog Modified champions of the annual event. This year, they made the long tow back to New Hampshire from New Smyrna Speedway a day early, with a bent racecar after a frustrating week of bad luck.

The team is holding their heads just as high as last year, though. Even though the end results of this Speedweeks aren’t what they wanted, the team also knows that they stepped up their game this season.

“I know that we performed even better than we did at Speedweeks last year,” said Seuss. “Every night, except for one, we had a top-five run going. We started out the week with a third-place finish, and we just got caught up in some bad luck. We’re proud of how we ran. We took what we learned all of last year and applied it this week. The car was better this time, and I was a better driver. We just didn’t have the breaks that we needed.

“We didn’t have the results that we wanted to, but everyone knew we were there this week.”

The fact that the team was able to race at all on several nights, much less run competitively, was an accomplishment in itself considering that they were continuously fabricating and repairing parts on their only racecar – a 10-year-old Troyer chassis.

“We had a lot of parts to fix this week,” said Seuss. “We split two rear ends in half, we broke the tailshaft on the transmission, we replaced a driveshaft, and we had to build new spindles and tie rods.”

Since the Seuss team is a low-budget operation, most of those parts were built and not bought. The team makes their own spindles, tie rods and nerf bars, for example, to save money.

“We make a lot of our own stuff, and we’re good at patching things back together,” said Seuss. “We always bring a welder and a lot of tools to the track. That’s why we were able to get the car back together down at New Smyrna. We wouldn’t have gone out and bought a new rear end even if we were back at our shop, so to piece something together down there was not big deal. We have a lot of good and crafty people on this team, and they’ll get things done.”

All three of Seuss’ wrecks this week came at the bumpers of other competitors. Florida Speedweeks has a reputation for being a rough-and-tumble affair, and Seuss definitely found that out this year. Still, he enjoys racing with many of the top performers who took part in the event this year.

“There are some guys out there who are a lot of fun to race against,” said Seuss. “Guys like the Blewetts and Eric Beers are like that. They can be aggressive and the racing can get physical, but they won’t just turn you either. I always look forward to racing with those guys, because they are professionals. It shows when you look at the results from this week. [Eric Beers, Jimmy Blewett and John Blewett III swept the top-three positions in the standings and won all but one race during the week].

“But there are some other guys who aren’t as good at it. Sometimes you wonder if they should be doing something else because of the wrecks that they cause by not using their heads. It’s a shame that because of their actions, equipment gets torn up. We’re just trying to keep our bills down and race as much as we can. That gets difficult when you have to repair crash damage.”