June 28th, 2009

I'm beginning to feel like it's the offseason and I'm living in Seattle. It's rained here in Salt Lake for something like 14 of the past 17 days. I never thought I'd consider building a ark while living here. I may have forgotten what a green flag looks like! I've been in the race car a couple of times for practice but with rainouts, etc, I've raced once in the last 75 days. We raced in Blythe on April 18th and at RMR in May. Considering that I pulled off with a flat tire in Blythe after 7 laps and was caught up in a lap 4 multi car pile up here, by the time we go out on July 4th it will be 3 months since I've ran a full main event. Like I said last week, it's been a weird year.

I'm hoping everything works out to run on July 4th. My two favorite race weekends are always Memorial Day and Independence Day. I started calling around for a new clutch late last week and everyone was back ordered. I have a clutch disk scheduled to arrive on Tuesday. If it gets here Verlin and I will get the engine ready on Tuesday night. Our last time out the car was very fast and we ran away from everyone in the heat race. I'm hoping that all of our bad luck is behind us and we can win a few races before the checkered flag falls for this year.

June 21st, 2009

For the third time this year Rocky Mountain Raceways rained out last night. It just shows what a mixed up racing year this has been. Since "un-retiring" in 2001, I had only been rained out once: Memorial Day last year. Being out of the points race for the championship already (thanks to some bad luck and USAC) it's not that big of a deal to me one way or another. For the second weekend in a row I had a lot of fun without racing. This weekend Gregg, Robin and I went to dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse. My redneck roots were very apparent. Afterward we met Austin, Lindy and some of their friends at the movies. This is the second movie I've gone to in 2009. Probably a record for me. I'm not a big movie guy. Once the rain started coming down on Saturday I pulled the rear end out of the car. I thought we were going to need to replace the torque tube but ended up only needing to do some work on the ball and retaining ring. The engine is ready to be pulled which Verlin and I will do tomorrow night. We'll put in a new clutch and hopefully have the car ready to run on July 4th. to show how out of control most racers are, a large group of us met at the indoor go-kart track. Here it is a Saturday where we can all relax and we can't wait to get to at least a go-kart track, LOL.

The week before was a lot of fun. ADT had about 50 of us come to the Philadelphia area to participate in a expansion of one of our recent acquisitions. We were there from Tuesday through Friday. On each of the evenings I played tourist. On Tuesday I went to Valley Forge, Wednesday to the Liberty Bell and Betsy Ross home and Thursday to Gettysburg. On Friday I was planning to go to Williams Grove to watch the sprints. When it was called for rain I headed to New York City, checked in and caught the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch the Yankees and Mets. After the game I walked over to Times Square and indulged in some "people watching". On Saturday there were all of the tourist stops. Some things have changed since my last visit, others had not. I was very disappointed to see that the Twin Towers construction is way behind schedule. It's absolutely pitiful that by the time the 10th anniversary of 9/11 hits, there will still be nothing finished. After the touring it was back to the Times Square area for a snack then a couple of blocks over to see "Wicked" and later on, "Phantom". I've seen them both before but it's still a great way to spend a Saturday night in the Big Apple.

June 6th, 2009

'I guess we're going to have our 2nd bad year in a row. I'm not sure if I've ever gone this long with so much rotten luck. It's as if the racing God's are toying and teasing me. Most of my parts to repair the car from the May 16th crash started appearing this week. By Thursday the car was mostly repaired. I had a falling out with USAC at the last event but swallowed my pride. I hate "all-nighters" before an event but Verlin, Michelle, Gregg and I worked on the car until about midnight Friday evening. After they left I kept going until 2:45am. I was back up at 7:15 to wash the car, golf cart and trailer.

When I headed onto the track I couldn't believe it, After all the repairs we had to do, the car was AWESOME, we had hit the setup perfect right out of the box. On the 2nd lap the clutch let go and our night was over. I've got some business trips coming up so we're going to be late July on having the car back out. But those dudes best enjoy the fun times because at the end of July, the old man is going to show the kids how it's done.