Ty Majeski Turns the Page from 4-17 Disqualification
Win as a team, lose as a team.
Ty Majeski and Toby Nuttleman quickly turned the page towards the Snowball Derby on Sunday in the aftermath of a disqualification on Saturday night in the Bill Bigley Sr. Memorial 128 that cost them a $30,000 payout.
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They won the race in a spirited duel with Michael Atwell, and then had the victory taken away for a single hollowed-out suspension bolt, when the rules have recently transitioned to solid bolts. It was very clearly an innocuous mistake but one counter to the rules, nevertheless.
Nuttleman quickly owned the mistake and Majeski isn’t letting it bother him either.
"Yeah, it obviously, stings," Majeski said. "Yeah, it stings for sure, but we've been joking around about it, so we're good. We win and lose as a team. That's just how we've always been. There are races that I lose us and sometimes there are races that another member of the team loses us.
"And this time, Toby felt like he missed it. We win and lose as a team and we’re ready to go."
Majeski and Nuttleman are one of the most prolific combinations in recent short track history, having won the 2020 Snowball Derby and countless other marquee events throughout the country, with the meticulous crew chief amongst the most thorough in the industry.
He just missed this one but Nuttleman has done a lot of winning too — continually churning out race contending cars at the biggest race of the year regardless of which chassis manufacturer is currently stealing all the headlines.
While other teams have jumped from hot hand to hot hand in FURY, Hamke, Senneker, Port City or Senneker, there’s Nuttleman and Majeski either in a modified Pathfinder or the custom-built TOBY Car. Alongside Derek Thorn and Campbell Motorsports, it’s the most consistently competitive program in the Snowball Derby over the past decade.
"It's much harder now that I don't race these as much, so we're having to work a lot harder than what we used to," Majeski said. "Over the course of like '18, '19, and '20, we were super dominant. Now, I feel like we can show up and win any race that we enter but it's not as easy as it was two or three years ago.
"We don't race as much and that is a challenge, but Toby and I talk pretty much every day about how we can stay ahead of the curve and make these cars better. I feel like we make a big step forward at Punta Gorda with some new idea and brought that over here and testing went well, so we'll see."
This is the second year that Majeski and Nuttleman have brought TOBY Car 001 to Pensacola. In other words, a full year with a notebook on it, which is historically better than a brand-new chassis for this combination.
"It's been a good car for us in Wisconsin, we won the Rattler with it so I feel like we have a good baseline for it," Majeski said.
And should Majeski win this race for a second time in three years, he says it would be just as meaningful.
"I don't think winning this race would ever get old," Majeski said. "It's incredibly hard to do once, let alone twice. I feel like we've got a really good shot at it coming up and we're ready to give it all we have."
