Hey guys!

One of the coolest things I’ve done that I want to tell everybody about is going out to Bonneville with my buddy Hans DeBot and Keith Adams, who’s the guy doing the work building the Bonneville car. We took off and went on a trip to Bonneville and spent Thursday and Friday there and had a lot of fun. We met some of the guys out there, Tom Birkland, who has the land speed record now, at 417 mph. We talked to him quite a bit, also some of the SCTA officials. Lee Kennedy, the head tech guy from SCTA, he really took care of us out there. They were super nice to us, ran us around, and everybody showed us their cars. We had a great time!

The neat thing is the rules for the class; the class we’re racing is unlimited streamliner. The rules are really simple; the cars need to have four wheels basically. So it’s a lot of creativity, a lot of our own engineering. What I thought was really cool is that everybody’s car at Bonneville looks different, they’re all different, and they’re all special. It’s just kinda like the original hot rodding place, you just go up there and you go as fast as you can. For anybody that hasn’t seen that movie The World’s Fastest Indian, with Anthony Hopkins, I recommend going and getting that movie. Once you see that movie you’ll understand why we’re building this Bonneville car. I’m excited about working on the project; it’s going to be a great thing to set the land speed record.

After the accident with my boys, my dad and I started talking and I wanted to come up with a project that I could do with my dad. It’s hard because I’m already racing so much. This car at Bonneville, I can do with my dad and my dad’s been instrumental in the design and the engineering with that car. My dad is like one of the very originally hot rodders. He’s in the drag racing hall of fame and the first drag race they ever had at Santa Ana, my dad was there. His motorcycle, the Beast, held all of the drag racing records for like the fist three years they ever had organized drag racing. They had what they called Top Eliminator and everything raced together, every type of car, and his motorcycle won Top Eliminator often. He’s gone to Bonneville before and he’s had Bonneville cars. I wanted to do a project with my dad; he’s a hot rodding pioneer and a drag racing pioneer. Since I live in NC and he lives in California, it’s hard for us to do stuff together so this is something that we can do together and hopefully next year go to Bonneville and set the record in a car that he did the design on.

After Bonneville we flew home on the redeye flight so my tail was dragging pretty bad. I got home on Saturday morning and my sister had come in to visit. She just got stationed out in Fort Bragg, N.C., so that’s good she’s closer to me, and I got to see Baby Andrew so that was good. We went right over to the new dragway where we had the show car and the race car on display and signed autographs and met thousands of people who are really excited about having the track over there in Charlotte. We had a really good day. Last Sunday, it’s kind of rare, but it was a day around the house, just picking up stuff, cleaning out the garage and doing all these things that most people do on weekends that I don’t get to do on weekends because I’m always racing.

On Tuesday I went up to Kenosha and met with everybody at Snap-on about how we could work better with all the Snap-on dealers and get a lot of Snap-on franchisees out here to the races and let them take experience what we have going on out here at the drag races.

Wednesday I picked up Jessie and her friend Gabby and we had a good time going to Discovery Place down in Charlotte. They had a display there on Pompeii, that city in Italy that got buried by a volcano like 200 years ago. They’ve got all these artifacts they’ve dug up, it was pretty interesting. Jessie didn’t want to go at first and then after we went for a little while she actually thought it was pretty cool!

Thursday night when we got to Indy we went to a nice dinner at St. Elmo’s with Roger Comstock and his wife Karen. Roger’s my fishing buddy that we went to the Rooster Fish Tournament in Cabo San Lucas with. That was really fun to see him.

We’re getting all geared up for Charlotte, you guys come out and see us and I’ll check back soon!