It’s Saturday morning at Phoenix and I have some time, so I wanted to update the blog. We can’t run until after 11 a.m. today, so I’m gonna do my second blog update this week. Wow!

We got into Phoenix Thursday morning and a group of us from the team, including David Powers and Antron Brown, stopped to visit our sponsors from Caterpillar and Matco. Ryan Haas of Forward Sports Marketing was hosting a seminar to talk about the dealer involvement in the NHRA program and how to activate and be involved on our car. Things went very well and we had a group of CAT folks from across the country at the track.

Thursday night, Stan from CAT, John Torok from Matco, Antron, Lee Beard, PR Ted, and I went to dinner at Sakana off of Elliott Road. Ted and Tor had sushi and the rest of us had the hibachi grill. It was excellent. They said it was some of the best sushi they ever had. If you’re a sushi fan and you’re in the Phoenix area, try Sakana.



We didn’t do much at the track other than get setup and work out of all the first day bugs. We have to get everyone back in sync. Most of our crew is intact from last season, but we have a few guys in different positions, so they all have to get acclimated and get that chemistry back. We’ll be all good in a few days.



What I really wanted to talk about in this blog was my troll. The troll came about when I got my first dragster in 1993, a Super Comp car. There was a movie called Demolition Man with Sly Stallone that I liked at the time. The little trolls were real popular and my mom gave me the troll and I thought Demolition Man would be a cool name for him because he was going to help me demolish the competition. He's been in my cars ever since.



When I drove Top Fuel in 1995 for the Montana Express car, I was running Connie Kalitta in the first round at Gainesville and we had a motor explosion and caught on fire real bad in the cockpit and I remember seeing the troll and he was shaking and I was trying to get the flame off him and control the car at the same time. He’s been on fire, I would guess, at least a dozen times.



He hasn’t aged well. He’s missing one eyeball and most of his hair. Everyone told me to just leave him. I thought some Scalp Med might help him, but he’s still without the big hair other trolls have and his eye. I even thought about retiring him if we won the championship. We didn’t and my troll is still in the dragster with me. Last week, Antron’s wife, Billie Jo, hooked up my troll with a custom firesuit. She used the scraps from my Impact! Racing suit and now my troll has a fireproof suit. He has a cool yellow and black CAT suit just like mine. Now, me and Demolition Man are ready for a championship run in 2008.



Oh, I’ll leave off with a funny story. PR Ted and I went to the LA Fitness near our hotel on Chandler Blvd. I was doing cardio and the rubber ear piece from the headphones on my iPod got stuck in my left ear. It felt really strange and started to get uncomfortable, so we cut the workout short and went to the CVS across the street so I could buy a pair of tweezers. We got in the rental car and PR Ted played doctor and pulled the ear piece out and I was back to normal, thankfully. He joked, “I’m not a doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” And that’s actually where we are staying.



That’s all for now. We’re about to warm up and make our first run.



Take care,
Hot Rod