User blog:Ajaxcupseries/What Is Wrong With Diego Orkedi? (The Fallon Corner Excerpt)

The Fallon Corner - March 2022

Where do we even begin with this one.

Its rather hard to believe Diego Orkedi is a 31 year old with 11 seasons of experience, 20 career Ajax Cup victories, three Windows 300 wins, and three Ajax Cup championships under his belt that’s currently in the first season of an 8 year, 96 million dollar contract.

Because right now, he’s driving like the 19 year old rookie version of himself he was back in 2010.

SEVEN DNF’s in his last 16 starts, all due to crash damage show that clearly something is amiss right now with Orkedi’s normally incredibly successful aggressive driving style. Especially after rewatching the film and seeing that five of those seven accidents were Orkedi’s fault and incredibly avoidable.

Last season, despite all the off track shenanigans he was involved in Orkedi looked like he was at the top of his game. Scoring a career high four victories in the first 10 races of the season, outside of his run-in’s with Jared Ayers he wasn’t really involved in any weekly on track drama besides that.

However, this seemed to all change at the start of the 2021 Northern 200, when as the pole sitter Orkedi cut off Ryan Braun in turns 1 & 2 and wrecked himself, Braun, his older brother Nick Orkedi, and Jimmy Hood. In typical Diego fashion he blamed the entire incident on Braun and many of us thought nothing of it, but the entanglement seemed to have sparked the downward spiral he has been on ever since.

Orkedi would proceed to be involved in an incident with Norm Lester on a restart in the Apple 225 a couple weeks later, and would rack up his next DNF in the season finale when he made contact with Randle Woods in what seemed like an attempt to wreck him and was promptly pile driven into the turn 4 Belltown wall by Woods’ teammate Jared Ayers.

This season though, Orkedi has reverted back to the late 2010’s version of himself which so far seems to be backfiring massively on him. Maybe karma has finally done its thing?

Notable egregious reckless driving moments include an incident in the Intel Shootout where Orkedi dumped Randle Woods, as well as his involvement in the lap 1 accident with Nick Painter where he clearly came up the track trying to avoid the wreck and turned himself into the wall.

This all culminated in Saturday’s Arris 200, where Orkedi was clearly frustrated from lap 22 onwards about his car, berating his team per usual but also taking out his anger on his competitors.

An uncontrolled tire penalty under a lap 64 pit stop cost Orkedi his 3rd place track position, and for the rest of the afternoon he was a man on a mission to get it back.

Not exactly by passing cars like a normal driver. Nah. Instead, he decided he would use his car as a bulldozer to get back to the front.

On lap 89, while battling for 9th place Orkedi put Jared Ayers into the wall, which led to Ayers cutting a tire down a short while later and bringing out a caution. On the ensuing lap 118 restart, Orkedi decided it’d be a great idea to take Shane Park and Brynn Rennerd THREE WIDE entering turn one. I think you can guess how well that went.

The lap 125 restart after that saw Randle Woods door Orkedi heading into turn 1, which created a tire rub on the three time champion’s left rear.

Instead of pitting to change said tire going down like Orkedi berated Laquon Scransen for not doing in the Ajax 200, the six time Stoneyard winner chose to stay on track and actually caught Chris Barrymore for the race lead. Of course right as he was looking underneath Barrymore for the lead in turn 1, the tire blew and wrecked them both.

I summarize all this to say these are incidents we expect to see ROOKIES involved in.

Laquon Scransen has gotten a lot of flack for his aggressive driving to start this season, but you have to remember he’s a 19 year old rookie with only four Cup starts under his belt.

What exactly is the highest paid driver in the ASCA’s excuse for driving with his head stuck up his you know what like this?

Its incredibly ironic the Orkedi made the post race tweet he did after the Advocare 200 that his competitors don’t know how to drive.

Clearly he needs to look in the mirror and clean up his act himself. Because right now HE’S the danger to the sport that he speaks of on a weekly basis.

If the 31 year old wants ANY chance of seriously competing for his fourth title this season, he needs to clean up his act ASAP and stop letting his anger get the best of him before he does seriously injure somebody out there.