Well, are you?

The younger half of Dual Red Racing definitely is.

The father / son team of John Redden and John Redden III <ed note: affectionately known as ‘Johnny three sticks’, except when he’s on duty as a Millville detective carrying his gun, in which case use less affection and call him ‘Sir, yes sir’, wanted the experience of competing together in the August 14-15 double ProIT event run as the support races for NJMP’s big ARCA ReMax Series weekend. So we entered the #98 Mazda RX7 driven by John III and the #99 Mazda RX7 driven by me, dad. As we were setting up on Friday the 13th, John III remarked about how he was so glad we were not going to be on the track this day as he is very superstitious.

Dad, who is not so superstitious, laughed it off.

While setting up, John III jumped into dad’s car to move it and hit his head on the convex mirror shattering it in pieces. He immediately got upset as dad said ‘don’t worry about it, I have other mirrors’ and John Part 3 explained that he wasn’t worried about the mirror, but the omen of breaking a mirror on Friday 13th. Again dad laughed it off.

Later that night he called dad and expressed his concern about the Saturday event as he felt like this bad luck omen was haunting him. Dad again laughed it off and told him to stop being silly.

Race day began Saturday morning with the first session of the day as practice and let me assure you the omen continued. On the first session, third lap (1,3) the #99 car blew the transmission shifting on turn #13. As he limped the car to a safe place, the chicane before turn #3, car #98 spun off turn #3 for a hard impact into the tire wall. As we both sat idly through the session awaiting a cold track and tow services, neither knew of the other’s mishaps. Back at the paddock as we assessed the damage and strategized a way to get one workable car out of two broken cars, and began piecing together the series of mishaps.

Hours later with the help of pry bars, duct tape, and wire ties, the #98 car was ready to
race in the ProIT from the 40th position (did not qualify). However, John III refused to carry his omen back onto the track. He played off the broken finger he had from the previous impact as his excuse, but dad knows it is the superstitious omen that kept him out of the racecar.

So in the end the #98 car was re-numbered to #99 and dad took the wheel. After
successfully moving through traffic and advancing 15 positions in the first 20 minutes of the race, two spinouts on Turn 1 brought the aggressive efforts back to reality. Dad admits that the spins were pure rookie driver errors, but John III maintains a different perspective. Since the #13 seemed to negatively impact this event, we plan to work all week to get both cars ready for the Summer Thunder Regional.

This time, we hope that the numbers 1 and 3 will hover over them with a goal of finishing 1st and 3rd!

<Ed note: You’ll read in the results for Summer Thunder that father and son finished 7th and 8th. In the interest of family peace, we won’t discuss whether it was father and son on top, and we won’t mention which one met the inside tire wall in Turn 3 at this event! The father / son team of John Redden part 2 and John Redden part 3, and their friends and family, are just some of the great peopleyou get to know at our race weekends>