Jeremy found the car to be tight during practice.  At the end of the final practice session, Jeremy was 16th fastest with a lap time of 21.476 seconds.  This was 0.937 seconds off the leader.  "The car had a push to it and throughout practice we made changes to make it better for qualifying," Jeremy said, "but the car never was a hundred percent."

The changes he made to the car did prove to make it slightly better for qualifying.  He was able to boost his lap time up to 21.255 qualifying him 15th.  It wasn't a big step, but it was one more position gained from practice to qualifying with a 0.221 second gain.

The car lined up on the grid prior to the start of the Walt's Foods 250

Jeremy started the race and found the car to be handling better than it had been all day.  Shortly in to the race, some cars in front of Jeremy checked up and started a chain reaction that ended with Jeremy hitting the #85 car of Robby Marhefka.  This caused some damage to the nose piece of the car, but nothing to worry about.

Pace laps before the race starts

Shortly after this incident, more bad luck showed its face to Jeremy.  As he tried to complete a pass on the #94 of Kris Limerick, Jeremy slid up the track across the nose of Limerick.  This tore off the complete rear bumper cover.  "I went into the corner a little too hard and I slid up into him a little bit," stated Jeremy.  Unfortunately, that little bit caused major problems as the car also lost the spoiler which creates all the rear down force on the car.  Immediately the car became very loose and hard to handle.

Around lap 60, another car dropped rear end fluid around the track and caused Jeremy to spin in turn four.  This caused a caution, but did not hurt his track position.  With an already ill handling race car, Jeremy also spun in turn two later in the race as he slid up the track and got into the marbles.  Again this caused a caution which he used to get fresh right side tires in hopes of getting just a little more traction.

Jeremy did a great job with the car he had and ran as long as he could.  After completing 218 laps he could not advance any more positions on the race track.  After a tough night of fighting the race car, he pulled the car to the infield and took the 13th finishing position for the night.  "The race was good for experience," said Jeremy, "and I got a good feel for the car.  It's just too bad we didn't have the spoiler for more corner speed.  It was really hurting the entry and middle of the corner not having the rear down force."

This race weekend completed Jeremy's 2004 race season with the USAR Hooters Pro Cup series.  Jeremy will be working towards getting ready for the 2005 race season over this fall and winter.  Coming up on Jeremy-Miller.com will be a "2004 Year In Review" and plans for his 2005 racing schedule.

Beat up but okay, the car sets in the infield of Illiana Motor Speedway