Hey all my Nitroholics, the brothaman is back on the NHRA.com blog. I’m back in Indy after spending June 30 in Denver for a charity event with Matco and Bandimere. It was an awesome time to benefit Bandimere’s Race to Read program and the NOCO 2030 foundation. I want to thank Matco district manager Mark Fishburn for inviting me.
Summer time is Indy here. It’s going to be a hot July 4th weekend here in Indy; in the 90s all weekend long. After Bristol and Norwalk, the Brothaman is ready for a little R&R with the family at home here in Indy. I hope you all have a great holiday weekend with your families.
Bristol was a pretty good weekend for our DSR Matco Tools team. Other than taking 18 hours to get from Indy to Bristol, it was a fun weekend for us as we almost rode that Aaron’s Lucky Dog to 8-0 this season. What’s normally about a 90-minute flight from Indy to Atlanta took me 5.5 hours in the same airplane to get to Atlanta with a pit stop in Birmingham. Then I had to spend the night at Motel 8 thanks to Delta, and let me tell you. I know why they leave the light on for you. LOL I finally got to Bristol on Thursday afternoon and then drove to Christiansburg, Va. to meet up with my DSR teammate Matt Hagan for an autograph session at Shelor Motor Mile.
Other than fighting Mother Nature, Bristol was good to us. We qualified decently and raced back to our third final round of the season before the parachutes came out early and we lost a squeaker to Larry Dixon and those Al-Anabi boys. We left the track around 10 p.m. and then drove home back to Indy. We got to the shop around 5:30 a.m. on Monday. It was the red eye drive. LOL
One really cool memory from Bristol was when we raced “the Greek” in the second round, after the race, Gary Gerould of ESPN gave me the mic and let me interview the Greek. That was really cool and I enjoy doing the TV work. It could be my fallback career if driving doesn’t work.
Norwalk is always a busy race for us. It’s Matco Tools’ home market. Matco’s headquarters are about an hour from the track. My boy TY and I left Indy around 7:30 on Tuesday morning and drove to Stow, Ohio to visit the employees at Matco right after our lunch pit stop at Chick-Fil-A. Then we attend the Cleveland Indians game on Tuesday night with our friends from Ohio Technical College. Wednesday morning we visited OTC for the third straight year with our Matco Tools dragster to speak to the OTC students. That afternoon I visited some TV stations in Cleveland to promote the Norwalk race and then headed to Middleburg Heights where my crew chief, Brian Corradi, owns a pizza shop called Master Pizza. You can visit them online at MasterPizzaNow.com. Brian let me cook my own pizzas and it was a fun time with our entire Matco Tools team. The pizza was really good too. Thursday morning I spent a few hours with Matco district manager Bruce Barber driving around Ohio to sign tool boxes. Matco came out with a box that has our race car on it, so I signed boxes for some customers that signed the box. All that and the race hadn’t even begun. LOL Then it was time to meet the family and be a big kid at the water park at Kalahari.
The Norwalk race wasn’t our best outing. We missed the first day of qualifying due to rain and that track was tough to manage with the new asphalt. A lot of cars were spinning the tires down track. We qualified ninth and ran low ET of the first round before losing a close one to Del Horsham in the second round. That’s racing. We’re still fourth in the standings and excited to get to Joliet next weekend, but first we’re going to enjoy the long weekend.
With that, some love, peace and hair grease, and I’m out like shout.
God bless.