Three Thompson Events in One Weekend Keeps Donny Busy
Last season in the final NASCAR Modified race of 2004, Donny Lia and his #18 Lia Motorsports, Inc. team literally had the wheels fall over their wagon at Thompson International Speedway (CT). They finished 27th after a strong run in that event when a hub broke on their car.
So this weekend, when the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour returned to Thompson for the season opening Icebreaker, the LMI team didn’t spare any amount of preparation to make sure that the problem didn’t happen again.
But there is no predicting a parts failure either. Lia led a few laps early in the race before the hub started giving him trouble again. Eventually, the team would fall three laps behind as the team replaced the hub and Lia motored on to a finish of 17th.
“I think what happened to us was the same thing that happened last fall at the World Series,” said Lia. “The wheel came lose again. We don’t know what it is, but we are going to have to figure it out. We took precautions after we had the problem and we still had the problem, so now we are thinking that maybe we got a bad batch of hubs or something.”
Before that, Lia had already run two races at Thompson over the weekend. He was entered in twin features for the SK Modified division driving the #47 Wisk car. On Saturday, Lia finished seventh and on Sunday, he was battling for second place when he got involved in a spin and dropped to the end of the lead pack with only five laps to go. Lia moved up to finish eighth at the end of the race. He enjoyed racing the SK and learned a lot
prior to starting a full season of racing the car at Stafford Motor Speedway.
“It’s just like I figured it would be,” said Lia. “Those are tough 25- and 30-lap races. You’ve got to race everybody hard and not give an inch. It’s a lot of fun. It’s good racing, sometimes a little bit dirty, but I like it a lot.”
Lia was quick to praise the Wisk team.
“They did a great job, the car drove nice and it was fast.,” said Lia. ““We got together, worked well and got to know each other. It was definitely good right off the bat. They had the car really figured out, I just needed to adjust it a little bit for my own personal preferences. But they already had it going good.”
Pulling double-duty at the track took some getting used to though as a driver.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be running two cars,” said Lia. “Everything
Donny was relieved to make it to victory lane.
went pretty well this weekend. We didn’t have any major problems. Hopefully at Stafford it goes even better now.”
There was one time in particular when Lia wishes that he could have been in two places at the same time.
‘We had a little problem going over the scales with NASCAR,” said Lia. “They needed me in the car to get the weight and I didn’t even think to go and take care of that. I was racing the SK when they did that and I should have got on top of that before. I was running around like a chicken with no head, so I apologize to everyone for that. But now that we’ve done it, I’ve got a better grasp on it now.”
But Lia knows that he can juggle the two schedules with little difficulty because of the teams that he is with.
“I have two really good teams and that makes it possible,” said Lia.
Lia will have next weekend off in both cars and will return to action on April 23rd and 24th at Stafford Motor Speedway with both the #18 LMI Modified Tour entry and the #47 Wisk SK Modified.
