It’s been a hectic week going to Arkansas and home to Las Vegas. After the Houston race, I flew home to Rogers, Arkansas, on Monday morning. I got back to the hotel about midnight and had to leave at 3 a.m. for a 6 a.m. flight. Our hotel was a good 45 minutes from the airport which is north of Houston. My childhood best friend, Chad Campbell, picked me up at the airport. Chad is sort of like my PR person in Northwest Arkansas. He handed me an itinerary for the week as soon as I got in the car.



I wanted to go home and see my mom, so that’s the first thing we did. I saw my dad over the weekend at the Houston race and he had to go away on a business trip. It’s always neat to go to your old room. It’s like it hasn’t changed in 20 years. I have the bulk of my racing trophies at home in Arkansas, so I took some pics. With my dad and brother Tony, we have like 100 trophies. That night, a group of us had plans to go watch the NCAA championship game with some old high school and college friends. It was great.



I’ve been hunting sponsorship to help our race team. The primary reason for the visit was the meet with potential sponsors. We had a breakfast meeting with a gentleman named Dick Trammel on Tuesday morning. He was one of the founders of Arvest Banking Group. Our family has been banking with them forever. He’s a good family friend and wanted to have a meeting to bounce ideas about sponsorship. Then, we went to a seminar at Morgan Stanley. David Darst was the speaker and we met with him after his presentation. He told us that he was a big drag racing fan and being from New York City, he would go to Englishtown. It was cool because he was asking me questions. Later that afternoon, I got to meet with the Mayor of Rogers, Steve Womack. His dad owns a TV station that used to broadcast our high school football games.



Wednesday morning, I did some in-studio radio appearances. We hit one station in Rogers and two in Fayetteville, where I went to college. We did a sports station, The Fan, and the big controversy was that Arkansas had hired Dana Altman as its new basketball coach, but he quit less than a day later. It was fun to be on the air back in my old stomping grounds. That night, I had an appearance at the new Pig Trail Harley-Davidson in Rogers. They had bands, food, music, bikes and a lot of really cool people.



I spent Thursday morning with my mom. I felt bad because I had been running around so much and didn’t really spend a lot of time with her. That afternoon we had lunch with an agency called CJRW. They were impressed by us and the sport. We felt like we accomplished a lot during the week. The best part of the week was my appearance at the local Valvoline Instant Oil Change in Rogers. My old high school buddy Michael Hudson owns it. They had been running radio ads for the appearance. I was really nervous because the weather was really bad that day. It got really cold out, like 30 degrees with snow. I was surprised that a few hundred people showed up. We had a TV station and the Mayor was there. It was really fun. I met a girl who runs Jr. Dragsters and she knew I raced and I was one of the reasons that she started racing. She said I gave her inspiration. That was really neat to hear. It made my trip.



By the end of Thursday, I was worn out. I flew to Las Vegas Friday morning. I didn’t get to see my mom enough, but she understood. Otherwise, the trip was a good shot in the arm. There are a lot of folks that support us. That was really cool to see.



I’ll talk about the weekend at home and the CART race next time.