Donny Breaks Through at Waterford

Setbacks, bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter how you define it, Donny Lia’s racing season has been plagued with problems. He’s been fast and his #18 Lia Motorsports, Inc. team has worked their hearts out, but one thing after another would set the team back.

Afterwards, in victory lane, Lia couldn’t be happier for his team of hard-working crew members.

“It feels awesome,” said Lia. “It’s just a big relief. We’ve known that we could win races, but we went through quite a period of tough times. We deserved this one. We paid our dues. I’m more happy for my guys than I am myself.

“I have a great team from top to bottom. I have a great group of guys who have a great time. They work really hard and every week when we had bad luck, it would break my heart. These guys give it their all and they deserve to be winning.”

“Bob Mueller at Troyer Racecars, I’ve got thank him for helping out this weekend, it made all the difference. We’ve been close every week, but this week we were just right on,

and Bob had a lot to do with that. But I’m real proud of my guys, we’ve been learning. My guys set the car up, I set the car up. We do this all ourselves. Bob just came in and looked over what we were running and said ‘hey this is what I would go with’ and it was a little different than what we had and he made a couple of great calls, but as a whole this team is really strong right now and we learned a lot and now its paying off here for once. But I gotta thank Bob, he was a tremendous help really got to thank him a lot.

“I need to thank all the guys, they just did a great job.

“Geoff and Rob did a great job in the shop getting the car ready and setting it up. Danny hit the stagger just right in the race. Garfield gave me just the right amount of fuel in the car. Sammy kept everything organized and going smoothly. Al did a great job spotting and keeping me out of trouble out there. Mike gets the truck back and forth to the track safely. Chad and Shane do a great job at the track doing anything that is needed. John Trask back at the shop does a great job fabricating everything and John Mazza makes the cars look sharp with his bodies and graphics.

“I’ve got to thank Jim Michaels at Performance Technology. We had a ton of motor problems this year, and we just

worked together and he does the right thing for me all the time and I can’t ask for anything more than that. He gives me great horsepower and hopefully all the little gremlins are gone and we can go ahead and do this all the time.

“You can’t help having parts failures and this year, that is what we’ve had. We have really had great horsepower and reliability under our hood.”

Also making the victory enjoyable was the hard-nosed racing with Flemke that Lia had to do to enjoy the privilege of winning.

“It was an awesome battle,” said Lia. “We battled for 75 laps. It was pretty intense. I’m really proud of the race that we had. We ran each other clean, but we raced really hard. It’s how racing should be. We had a fun battle out there.”

Lia took the chance in victory lane to also remember fallen Alabama racer Charlie Bradberry, who died in an automobile accident on Saturday at the age of 24.

“I want to dedicate this to Charlie Bradberry,” said Lia. “I didn’t know him, I might have met him once, I don’t remember. But I can relate to him because he’s a young guy trying to make it in the racing world. He didn’t die on the track, but it hits home a little bit. He’s my age, it’s just sad, sometimes you forget that you got to live every day like it’s the last one, and take every opportunity and try to make the most of it. He’ll never be able to do that so, you know, it just hits home. It’s just a sad deal.”