Hey everyone, BB here with a post Labor Day blog for y'all.

It was a crazy weekend around here.  Besides all the partying I did (hic) I, like a lot of you, listened to the audiocast from Indy and watched (IMHO) the best TV coverage of NHRA drag racing I've ever seen.  Kudos to the ESPN crew for a great job.  I especially dug the round-table discussions that Mike Dunn did with Snake, Force and WJ, those moments were the highlight of the coverage in my opinion.

Lot of news to get to so let's get started.

First off I'm very happy to announce that the one and only Mike Kloeber will be the crew chief for us at the Charlotte race.  I've known Mike for over 20 years and Gilby made what I consider a great choice to steer the good ship Gilby at our home town race.  It's only nine days to liftoff and Mike will be arriving in town very soon to go over everything, we should be starting the car up the first part of next week and we're all looking forward to getting back on track.

I took a hot lap up to zMax Dragway @ Concord this afternoon for the pre-race press conference that featured the current points leaders in both NHRA and NASCAR, Tony Schumacher and Kurt Busch.  They both had their show cars on display for the media and they ran a match race in identical Toyotas on the drag strip.  Guess who won and had the better reaction time?

Our graphics guy, Rich Singer, took a still shot he took of the Rianni car, put it through Photoshop and came up with this photo of the car that we'll be using for our handouts for next weekend.  I don't know how he does his magic but it sure does look like we ran the car already huh?

Speaking of the race, I predict that this will be the second biggest NHRA event of the year (behind Indy).  Saturday's reserved seats are sold out and from what I understand it looks like Sunday's finals are also near a sell out.  After this race weekend is over they'll begin working on increasing the seating capacity for 2009.  Plans are for more seats to be added, making zMAX Dragway the track with the most seats on the NHRA tour.

While I was up at the track today I ran into Chris Cunningham, crew chief for Bob Tasca, who was pulling out while I was pulling in.  He was there checking out the track and he told me that they've acquired some land in Concord and construction will begin very soon on a shop for the team who will be moving down here from Rhode Island in time for the 2009 season.

That's it for now, type at you L8R.

BB