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In Brainerd, I was goofing around during qualifying and the ESPN camera guy gave me his camera and this photo ended up in USA Today paper as well.

 

I started this blog after Charlotte, then tried to finish it after Dallas, then figured I would wait until right before our St Louis race and well....you get the idea. It has been a very, very busy last few weeks as of course the U.S. Nationals was rainy and then postponed for a week and we already had 4 races in a row to start our "playoffs" in the Countdown to the Championship.

We were striving as a team to get to the number one spot for more reasons than just the points that came with being number 1 in the "regular season". After winning the race up in Brainerd and recovering from a pretty wild winners circle party, Rahn Tobler and our NAPA AUTO PARTS team lost in the opening round in Indy and then we could solely concentrate on the start of the Countdown in Charlotte only a few days away from there.

While we didn't qualify as good as we have been, we did run very well on Saturday’s first session and we then made 4 great runs to get the win in a very long Sunday that didn't get started until late afternoon because of the rain.

We then went straight to Dallas for race #2 of the Countdown and also the $100,000 Traxxas Shootout that was part of the original US Nationals race before it was pushed to Dallas because of the weather in Indianapolis.

We got by Courtney Force in the first round and then had a tough matchup with our teammate Johnny Gray and then of course we lost a close race to John Force in the final round of the Shootout.

We were pretty bummed that we lost the chance at all that money, but we were very encouraged for our racecar and had good reason to as we went to the semifinals and kept adding the points.

We had a decent weekend in St Louis during qualifying as Rahn and our NAPA team battled back on Friday night to a good run, but being one of the first pairs out on the good Friday night session made us have to be a little more conservative. That is why I and other race teams stress how important it is to get down the track on the first session.

One thing that I have done with our Facebook fan page is to sort of make it like a real fan page should be.....while all of my tweets from my Twitter page (@NapaRonCapps) get posted directly to our Facebook fan page (https://www.facebook.com/RonCappsFC?ref=hl ), a couple of weeks ago I asked the fans to send me or post their favorite picture that they might have from one of our NHRA races with me or with our NAPA team and I wasn't really ready for the response that I got.

I say that in the best possible way I can say it, I was blown away by the amount of messages and photos that were sent and continue to be sent. I am still posting them, but my goal was to sort of give our wonderful NAPA racing fans a way to have everyone see what sort of experience they had with us and it still puts a big smile on my face.

I was on the road between Dallas and St. Louis races doing NAPA appearances and now I am home for a night, then off to Atlanta to NAPA HQ for a customer appreciation day and then straight to Pennsylvania for several NAPA events before starting our racing on Friday.

We get a couple of weeks off before our Vegas race and I will be attending the California Hot Rod Reunion at Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield on one of those weekends. I’m not driving this time, but will be there helping Del Worsham try to win the race with him driving his car. I can't wait.

We lost a little bit of ground to our DSR teammates in the Valvoline car and lead by only a couple of rounds with three races to go in the Countdown. I am looking forward to this coming weekend in Reading, PA., like no other race I have looked forward to in a long, long time, especially for our NAPA fans!

Talk to you soon!