Bad luck has followed Layne Riggs at nearly every track in 2021.
The unfortunate status quo continued for the six-time CARS Late Model Stock Car Tour winner on Saturday when he was forced to go behind the wall just 20 laps into Saturday’s 125-lap feature at Motor Mile.
Riggs knows his family-owned operation is still more than capable of contending for wins on a weekly basis and is frustrated that recent results do not reflect that efficiency.
“We were running pretty good early and I went to go get in the throttle off the corner and it went all the way to the floor,” Riggs said. “The throttle linkage came off and that’s just my luck. Hopefully it will turn around one of these days.”
After coming within just a few points of his first CARS Tour title in 2020, Riggs has finished15th or worse on five different occasions this year.
Mechanical failures sidelined Riggs early in the Old North State Nationals at Orange County Speedway and at Caraway Speedway. Late contact with Jonathan Shafer at Dominion Raceway ended a difficult evening for Riggs in which he struggled to keep pace with the leaders.
Following another poor showing in the Throwback 276 at Hickory Motor Speedway, Riggs and his team made numerous changes to his car during the month-long break so they could finish out 2021 on a positive note.
Several strong practice sessions and a third place qualifying provided Riggs some confidence knowing that the pace of his No. 99 Puryear Tank Lines Ford was not going to be a hinderance on Saturday.
Despite this, Riggs did not believe his car would have been strong enough to chase down eventual race-winner in Bobby McCarty had it completed all 125 laps.
“Bobby [McCarty] was really good, so it would have been hard to tell if the car was strong enough to win,” Riggs said. “I felt that I was really good on the short run at the very beginning but then fell off a little bit. At the very least, I would have had a Top 3 car.”
Rediscovering that speed for Riggs came down to carefully evaluating the setups that yielded Riggs the most success earlier in the season.
Riggs came up a few inches short of a season-opening victory at Dillon Motor Speedway but rebounded two months later at Ace Speedway with a dominating victory in which he led all but one lap.
While Riggs is proud of the hard work everyone has put in to making his cars better, he said that progress is futile unless they find a way to shake off their unfortunate circumstances and start accumulating more Top 5s.
“Praying is the best thing to do right now,” Riggs said. “I think our program is back where it needs to be and we’re coming up on some tracks where we’ve been good in the past, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t win every single one of them.”
Now that he knows his cars are quicker, Riggs enters the closing stages with more optimism in his ability to mix it up with the title contenders and add a few more victories to his growing Late Model Stock resume.
All he needs is a little bit of luck.
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