On Wednesday while Cousin Mike and I were doing the show car deal downtown the team made the 60 mile trip from our shop in Blacksburg, S.C. to the track. None of them had seen the track in person and I got a call from the guys when they arrived and they were freakin' out about how nice the track is.

The guys spent Wednesday setting up the pit in the rain while the dudes from the rental company put up the Rinnai hospitality tent, as you can see it looked pretty snappy.

Usually between pro qualifying sessions at NHRA national events "Nitro Alley" gags up with fans and when we have to run errands on our golf cart or scooter it's sometimes quicker to walk than deal with the congestion. Well zMax Dragway, in my humble opinion, had more fans in the pits then I've ever seen before, check out this shot.

One of the more unusual fans out there was this guy who calls himself Dr. Death Wish; don't know why but he wanted to be in our blog so here you go dude.

Let's talk a little bit about Mike Kloeber. I've known Mike casually over the years but I really got to know him this weekend. He was picked to be the crew chief and was thrown into a very unusual situation with a new car he's never seen before, with a new crew and a new tire at a new track with no data and he did a great job. Here's a shot of Mike working on an engine right after the cardboard box he was sitting on collapsed without any notice, It was pretty funny.

As far as the racing part of it, we won the high ET and low speed award for the nitro Funny Cars in qualifying but we were bolstered by the fact that we went down the track four times and didn't hurt anything except a couple of pistons and even though we didn't qualify we came away from the race with a good base line to work from. 

I've also got to give a big shout out to Bob Frey. We show up with a new sponsor and he made it a point to stop by our pit to learn about tankless hot water heaters so he wouldn't sound like a geek (his words) while announcing our runs. We hooked him up with Jay Gregory, Rinnai's National Account Manager, who filled him in on the product and Bob did a great job for us on the PA. Thanks my friend. 

That's it for now, type at you tomorrow.

BB