When he marched up to the shiny hauler carrying the No. 2 sprint car, the “Albany” luggage routing strip on Brooke Tatnell’s duffel bag told part of his story.
“I got a phone call at 1:30 Sunday morning from Larry Woodward saying, ‘Give us a call in the morning. We may need you!’ The next morning I talked with Larry and Mike Woodring, who organized the airline tickets to fly out here. I didn’t want to be here under these circumstances, but we’re going to do what we can to help Craig Dollansky and Larry. In tough times, the racing community sticks together.
“But before I could come out here, we had to run down to Huset’s Speedway, which is five hours from my house. I ran there last night, got home at three, took a shower and went to the airport for a 6 a.m. flight this morning. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind!”
The trip to New York’s Lebanon Valley Speedway was brought about after Dollansky suffered a compound fracture of his upper right arm in a crash at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway.

"You have good years and bad years, and last year, we had a bad year. We put a race team together at the last second, in January, to start racing in February. You can’t run on the road with these guys that way."

— Brooke Tatnell

“It was one of the worst impacts ever,” declared Woodring. “I told Craig today that he can thank the Butler seat for preventing a massive head injury. And even then, he did break his helmet when he hit.
“The frame broke from the impact and everything on the right side was just gone. The cage cracked in one little spot, but the car definitely did its job. We stripped it down and it’s going back to Maxim. They’ve been working very hard since Jeff Shepard’s accident at Knoxville, focusing on safety and on keeping people from getting hurt.”
As Woodring filled us in on the Eldora crash, Tatnell jumped into the seat of the replacement car. He asked that the headrest be moved a little, said the stiff throttle spring was just the way he liked it, inspected the knee and leg guards and declared he was ready to race.
When we suggested that it was good that he was the first one the team thought of as a replacement but bad that a driver of his stature wasn’t already on the road with the Outlaws, the Australian nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, I’d like to think so, though some might disagree with you. You have good years and bad years, and last year we had a bad year. We put a race team together at the last second, in January, to start racing in February. You can’t run on the road with these guys that way.
“We still won an Outlaw show and ran sixth at the Nationals, but all in all it wasn’t a great year. This year, we’ve been partners in a car and hitting and missing around Knoxville, Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s been a pretty quiet year.”
Tatnell is back on the national stage with a few weeks to prove he belongs there.
“We’re basically employed to do a job. It’s just like when the stock market crashes. You’ve got to get back in there and figure out how to make money and turn things around. One positive is that I’m jumping into a car and team built around Craig and they’re fast,” Tatnell said. “There’s a lot of pressure on us, a lot of responsibility. It might take a night to get comfortable but there’s no worry about whether the car is fast or not. We’re not going to make any excuses. As a paid professional, your job is to stand on the gas and drive it towards the front.”