Let me try to get everyone caught up with what I've been doing. Our new CAT deal has me plenty busy and I love it. They're going to be such a great partner for us.

Before I left for Memphis, I got to do something really cool. I was invited out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway where they were filming Pinks All Out – which will be televised the week of Thanksgiving – and my little brother, Tony was trying to qualify for the show. What people don’t realize is that they pick a group of cars that have similar ETs, not the fastest cars. Tony’s car, a ’69 Camaro, was too fast. It’s a Super Street car that ran 9.50s. They picked a class that was running 10.60s. But it was cool to be out there and meet a lot of fans. There were some exhibition runs and Jr. Dragsters and it was cool to hang out with everyone. I really dig hanging out with the NHRA fans. I met the guys from Pinks and did a few interviews for the show. I’ll be excited to watch.



PR Ted and Zak Elcock at NHRA had some pre-event press work before Memphis lined up. It’s my hometown track, so we did a lot of press in Little Rock and the media luncheon in Memphis. The coolest thing that happened was I had a meeting with Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe on Wednesday before the race. When I got there, Dick Trammell, who set up the meeting, and the governor’s aides walked me into his office and we chit-chatted for about 45 minutes. He was proud that our team is doing so well this season and he’s a big racing fan. Our goal is to get him to the track some day. We have some interest in opening a drag strip in Arkansas and he wants to help, so that’s really neat. My high school best friend, Chad Campbell, was there and took some pictures, but somehow he lost the camera on the plane flight back to Northwest Arkansas. He had just returned from a vacation and lost all those pictures too, so he was pretty bummed about that.



We spent the rest of the day doing press work in Little Rock. We ate at a cool restaurant called The Flying Fish with Steve Rogers of the Democrat-Gazette newspaper. It had been a long time since I had some good fried food. The catfish and shrimp was good! Later that night, we drove back to Memphis and had dinner at PF Changs near our hotel. A crew guy, Mikey, from Larry Dixon’s team ate with us.



We did the NHRA press conference at Folk’s Folly the next afternoon and from there we took a few hours off and did some cardio. Ted and I both like to work out and stay in shape. We have a lot of guys on our team that like staying in shape with Baze and the guys on his team that ride bikes. It’s important to look and feel well. That night we met up with Whit and went to a Matco Tools dinner with Russ Holland, the local Matco district manager in Memphis. We got to hang out with the Matco distributors for a few hours. It’s nice to get to talk and hang out away from the track in a relaxed environment.



After that, we had some fun and went to Beale Street. We dropped off Baze because he’s an old family man (Just kidding Baze!)and we drove around Memphis for a few hours. We met up with Hillary Will, my favorite Top Fuel driver, and had dinner at Rendezvous. We had some ribs; they were just ok. I wasn’t that impressed and the waiter didn’t like me. He was mean, but my company was good.



Finally, we got to race. Memphis is a special place to me because it was the first place I ran Top Fuel back in 1995 and I got my first win there in 2005. We didn’t qualify great this year, eighth, and seemed to have some gremlins all weekend. That was the first bad weekend for us and its unfortunate it happened during the Countdown. It could have been a lot worse. We were lucky Schumacher and Dixon went out early as well.

We decided to test on Monday after struggling during the weekend. Over the weekend, we were tight as a group, but we got back to joking around and having fun during the Monday Nationals. The car made some progress and we hope that leads to a strong finish to the season. I’ll do another blog entry in a few days and talk about my time in Arkansas and our Dallas trip.



Take care,

Hot Rod