Steven Wallace didn’t think he would come back to the Snowball Derby anytime soon.
It was a little more than a year ago that he said, “been there, done that and got the shirt.” After all, Wallace kissed the Tom Dawson Memorial Trophy back in 2004 with Richie Wauters Motorsports, and wasn’t sure the expense was worth it when he didn’t win.
For his one victory, he has six other appearances that didn’t go his way.
But when crew chief Jeff Fultz and several new sponsors stepped up with a cool aesthetic idea for the biggest race of the year, Wallace and FURT Race Cars couldn’t resist.
The No. 66 is painted in the yellow and white colors of Rusty Wallace’s widely-successful short track tenure.
“Man, this is cool,” Wallace told Short Track Scene. “A lot of people only remember his NASCAR stuff. But he was awesome in these colors when he ran ARTGO and ASA. He raced Mark Martin and Dick Trickle with this paint scheme. We’ve always ran red or black cars, but since we had two sponsors for this race, we decided to do something cool.”
READ MORE: Complete Snowball Derby coverage
The sponsors are WearCrete Diamon Concrete Polishing and South Point Casino, the latter of which funded his NASCAR Xfinity Series effort over the last decade and the 2018 Snowball Derby is a reunion for Wallace and the Gaughans.
“I could not be here without Michael and Brendan Gaughan and Curtis Venable from WearCrete. Jeff and I are friends with Curtis and he used to build some pretty badass cars back in the day. So we have two incredible partners and a good team behind me.”
But the weekend has not started according to plan.
Wallace broke a rear-end on the No. 66 during the first practice session and missed the rest of the day replacing it with pieces from their back-up car. At one point, Fultz had the car jacked-up on all four corners and was inside the wheel well tearing the rear-end apart.
At the same time, Wallace was tearing apart the back-up to get the pieces they needed for the primary.
“It started off really good and then it got tighter and tighter and the rear end just went bad,” Fultz said. “We felt a vibration and was spinning one wheel. Our cars turn too good and run too good to be doing that.”
RECAP AND RESULTS: Thursday Snowball Derby practice
Despite tearing the car apart and rebuilding it for three hours, Wallace believes the car will be just as good as they expected it to be all along.
“A hundred percent, for sure,” Wallace said. “We weren’t that good off the truck … I was just tight and all the stuff we changed on it didn’t correlate to how it should have felt. I was going through the gears and the wheels didn’t go together, and we worked on it all day, wholesale and nothing worked.
“So, when nothing worked and we tore it apart, we figured it out. I should have known better. I felt that. But I have complete confidence in the car now that we’ve torn it apart. We ain’t afraid of work here. It’s just going to make Sunday sweeter.”
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