It’s nice to be home in Las Vegas and get away from drag racing for a few days. Sometimes you just need a little "you" time. It’ll be good to refresh before Memphis and Dallas. I’m going to stay on the road and spend some time at home in Arkansas before the Dallas race.

The last time we blogged was Friday at Reading. That was a good day because we outran the Army car and got the pole at Maple Grove. It was our fourth pole of the year. Unfortunately, we had to wait three extra days to get the race completed. We came up short in the final round. Other than not leaving with the trophy, check, and winner’s circle photos, there was nothing to gain as we had locked up the top seed in the Countdown. That was a great accomplishment for our race team.



We’ve been competing without a major sponsor and on a shoestring budget. We haven’t done any testing other than in January and we have a consistently good race car. Rob Flynn has been awesome and my new crew is a great bunch. We have great team chemistry and they’re a cool group to be around. Losing 184 points wasn’t fun, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt, so we’ll deal with it and race and do our best to win this thing. Somebody has to beat that Army car and why not us?



The weekend before Indy I hung out at home with some friends of mine. Maybe you saw on the ESPN2 that I bought a new car. NHRA.com blog readers know I sold my Viper earlier this year and it was time to buy a new car. I ended up with a ’72 VW Thing. It’s in great shape and I think it’s really cool. I can’t wait to bring it to the track at Vegas in October. It’s not fast like the Viper, but it’s still neat.



Last week was a good week for our team. We announced our deal with Caterpillar. Yes, it is a multi-year deal. We’ve been getting that question a lot. We’ll be flying the CAT colors for the rest of ’07 as well! So, the Great White is finally put to rest. Caterpillar is one of the five most recognizable brands worldwide, so we’re very proud to be the team to represent CAT in NHRA drag racing. They’re a great group of people and we look forward to growing our relationship with them while helping all the CAT dealers in their search for technicians.



The Indy race went ok for us. We won the Full Throttle award and qualified sixth and went to the semis for the 13th time this year. We were a victim of the one-lane track. We donated our Full Throttle earnings to the Adam Hiller Recovery Fund as did the Vance & Hines Harley team. We want to thank everyone for all the support for Adam. We raised more than $10,000 last weekend to help in his recovery efforts. The support from the entire NHRA community was awesome, so thanks to everyone. The entire Harley group has been awesome to work with. We’re working on opening a Paypal account for online donations, so please be patient with us for that. We will put out a press release before Memphis.



Not being atop the standings isn’t fun. We would still have a 140-point lead, that’s seven rounds of racing and our car is still very consistent. We’ll be there in the end. We were third after Pomona in February and won Phoenix, so that’s our goal in the second season. I’ve done very well at Memphis, so we’re excited about heading back to MMP, where I got my first Top Fuel win in 2005.



We’ll see how things play out. Have a good weekend.

Hot Rod