After a devastating week, Rick Riccardi needed the time away. See, Riccardi lives and works in Toms River, New Jersey – just a stone’s throw from the beach where Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy wrecked the lives of millions of people.  He’s fresh off a win at the NMRA World Finals, where his car performed at its best level ever – resetting the NMRA Hot Street Record in the process.  After the NMRA race, he put the car in the trailer only to find a bunch of metal in the oil pan due to a freak occurrence. After pulling the engine and repairing it quickly, he put the engine back in the car, and the car back in the trailer, only to have Sandy show up on the doorstep just a week prior to this race at Maryland International Raceway. Riccardi explained, “We finished getting the engine back into the car the morning that the storm rolled in. We’re three miles from the ocean. There are bridges out all over the place – even right now there are still about 60-70% of people are out of power. Dennis [Varga, his crew chief] and his wife and daughter stayed with me for a couple of days – their house was finally powered up again the day we left for MIR. His garage is wrecked, everything inside is destroyed. We weren’t even going to go with all of the stuff going on here – it’s like a war zone here right now all around us. But after we talked about it, we realized there wasn’t much more we could do here, so we went racing and we’re glad we did.”

The racing part wasn’t easy, though. That race-winning car from Bowling Green had suddenly turned into a slip-n-slide ride on the MIR 1320. “We thrashed all weekend long on this car. We were third in qualifying, with a .37, but had a bunch of things to work on between qualifying and eliminations. I had to change my vacuum pump, and we also changed a couple of things in the suspension with the help of Charlie Booze, Jr. The car would hook and then blow the tires off two feet off the line. Once we figured out what was happening we were able to make the adjustments. After the changes, the car went out and put a 1.142 short time up with an 8.20 run – our best ever. They had the track set on kill all weekend; it was a great surface. We made it through all of the elimination rounds and took out the number-one-qualifier in the final round – this makes two races in a row for us and is a great way to end the season,” said Riccardi.