Heartbreak in Bristol, early end to promising day.

For the 90 truck, Bristol was supposed to be great...and it was...until it wasn't. Starting the day rolling through tech everything seemed to be looking up for Justin Carroll and the 90 team. The sun was shining, the weather was beautiful. As the team rolled the car onto pit road to begin setting up for practice and qualifying, everything felt like it was falling into place. Clearly the preparation for this race exceeded other efforts in the past. With 36 trucks on the entry list, they knew this race would be different than Bristol races they had attempted in the past, because they knew they would be racing that night under the lights inside "The Last Great Colosseum". Practice went pretty well. The truck fired off in the top ten on the scoreboard before the rest of the field caught up to the track, and during the second grouping the track got even faster. With Carroll running lap times in the low 16 second bracket, the team knew there was work to be done. Qualifying came around and with the truck not starting, the team had to gear up the leg work and push start the car onto the track. They made it. It fired up and made the two quickest laps of the day, with a final time of 15.94 seconds. It was good enough to hold onto the top spot through three more trucks, but the time eventually fell to a 32nd place qualifying effort. Still better than a few teams who have a lot bigger budgets. Everything felt great going into the race, and Justin was making progress, but while running 29th in the first stage, a brake failure caused an early retirement from the race. The team did what they could to repair it and get him back out, but to no avail. In what was such a great, smooth-running day for Carroll Motorsports, settling for a 36th place finish was definitely heartbreaking to this grass roots operation. However, spirits were high otherwise knowing what a good chance they had at a decent finish, and the team vowed to come back stronger at their next attempt...Martinsville on April 5th, 2024.