Lucas Punkari
In most cases, a third-straight top 15 finish, in what was just your fourth career start in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, is a pretty big accomplishment for most drivers.
But in the case of Fort Frances native Steve Arpin, a 13th-place showing in the AAA Insurance 200 at Lucas Oil Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind. back on July 29, left him frustrated—and both he and his Turner Motorsports team looking for more.
“It’s definitely disappointing for the whole group,” Arpin sighed.
“For me as a driver, I know that I am capable of much more than that, and for my crew it’s the exact same feeling,” he noted.
“We just need to find that edge and find that little thing that we are missing, and then we just have to plug it all in.
“If you are a little bit off in this sport, it’s just huge out there on the track,” Arpin added.
“But we once we find those kind of things that we are missing, there will be a whole different outlook on things,” he reasoned.
Going into the 200-lap affair on the 0.686-mile oval, Arpin and the rest of the #32 Mike’s Hard Lemonade Chevrolet Silverado team made some changes with the set-up of the truck to try and solve an issue they’d been having all year.
But while that problem was solved, another one soon would crop up.
“We have been fighting a loose condition getting into the corner all year, and we did a lot of things to fix that going into Indy,” Arpin explained.
“While that made our corner entry a whole lot better, what it did was translate our issues to the centre of the corner, and we ended up being really tight there and the truck wouldn’t turn.
“Everything that we came in with should have worked in theory and on paper, but it just didn’t work on the race track at all and we just fell behind the eight ball,” he stressed.
This new issue led to the Mike’s Hard pit crew to make a number of changes to try and get the truck ready for the race, which would see them start in 19th position.
“Throughout practice and everything, we changed pretty much everything on the truck,” Arpin noted. “We changed eight different springs, we probably had four different sets of shocks on the truck, and we also changed the front- and rear-end geometry.
“It was interesting.”
Still stuck with a tight-handling truck as the race wore on, and without the help of caution flags that would allow his team to make additional adjustments, Arpin did move up in the field late in the race—and was just outside the top 10 with about 30 laps to go.
“At the end of the race, it was kind of one of those deals [where] everyone else that was running really fast at the start of the run would start to fall off a lot,” Arpin explained.
“While we weren’t able to run those fast laps, we were able to maintain our lap times a whole letter better and we were able to pick guys off at the end of the run.
“We just lost so much ground on the first part of the run because we were so tight, and as a result we couldn’t make up half of what we had lost.
“The way the race played out, with very few caution flags, we just kind of had to play the hand that was dealt to us, I guess,” he lamented.
As the race reaching its conclusion, which saw Timothy Peters come away with the victory, Arpin was told over the radio that he would have to go into fuel conservation mode as the entire field of trucks found themselves in a fuel millage derby.
“[Crew Chief] Doug [George] came over the radio and said I just had to slow right down as I was actually six laps short on fuel,” Arpin recalled.
“So in the last 30 laps, I had to save a whole lot on fuel. And when we go back to the garage area after the race and emptied the fuel cell, we found out that it had less than half-a-gallon left.
“We probably could have made it just one more lap before we would have run out,” he figured.
Although the Truck Series race might not have gone according to plan, the rest of Arpin’s week in Indianapolis went quite well.
There were public appearances for Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and he also had a chance to help Venturini Motorsports drivers Ryan Blaney and Kenzie Ruston during an ARCA race the day prior to the Truck Series event at Lucas Oil Raceway.
While Blaney, the son of Sprint Cup driver Dave, was able to come away with a second-place showing in only his second series start, Arpin was quite impressed by the performance of the 19-year-old Ruston, who ended up finishing in 26th after being caught up in a late-race incident.
“Honestly, she is one of the most talented female drivers that I have ever seen,” Arpin said.
“She has a really good head on her shoulder, and all that she needs is just some extra seat time to get into the car and learn how to drive these things.
“I think you’ll see her around for a long time,” he added.
With now more than a month until his fifth and final race in his deal with Turner Motorsports, which will be at the Chicagoland Speedway on Friday, Sept. 16, Arpin will be spending that time working with his team towards getting things ready for that event, along with doing some spotter work for Nationwide Series pilot Justin Allgaier.
However, the biggest thing the 27-year-old will be working on is to get everything nailed in place for the 2012 season.
“That is the number-one priority,” Arpin stressed.
“We’re working with Mike’s, and doing absolutely everything in our power to get everything wrapped up and done,” he noted.
