Well, it’s been a lot has happened since the last blog so I’m glad to be back to catch you guys up on things. Back a few weeks ago I went to the Sprint Sound and Speed event in Nashville; it is sort of the kick off to the NASCAR season and a bunch of the NASCAR guys were there. It was a lot of fun hanging with those guys. I took Jessie to the Ringling Brothers circus recently and that was cool. I hadn’t been to the circus in about 20 years and I forgot how much fun they are. Jessie enjoyed it and I had a really good time too.

At the end of January I went to a Charlotte Checkers hockey game for Race Night. They do the event every year, they have a bunch of drivers from the area come out and a lot of fans come for the autograph session. Jessie brought her friend Olivia and one of James’ friends, Chris, came with us too. We got the full hockey experience! We got to ride on the zamboni and go out on the ice for the puck drop. Every Race Night the Checkers pick some local charities and part of the proceeds from the night are split amongst the charities, so this year they chose B.R.A.K.E.S., which was really cool.

Everybody is a few races into the season and it’s a bummer that we’re not out at the track. I’ve had a lot of fans email in and ask what’s going on with the team and whether we’ll be back out this year. Things are tough right now, there are a lot of good drivers that have been doing this for a long time that are out of a ride. It stinks but with the economy the way it is, that’s just how things are right now. We’re all hoping it will improve soon. I think we might have some sponsorship support for a race soon. We’ve been talking to a new company about doing something with us for Atlanta. It’s really exciting and we’re hoping to have an announcement about that soon.

We’re making a lot of progress with the Bonneville car. We’ve got a website that will be live soon that will be updated weekly with new pictures and descriptions of what we’re working on each week. The guys have been doing a lot of welding, trying to get the thing together. We’re getting the ProCharger, supercharged Dodge Viper Engines built up now. They should make a total of about 4,000 horsepower. Ray Evernham has really jumped on board and has been helping the project out a lot. One of his engineers, Dr. Eric Warren, is an aerodynamic expert and he really knows his stuff. He’s been out at the shop working with the guys a lot too. We’ll be going to test within the next few months and then we’ll be out in Bonneville Aug. 7-15 for Speedweeks, where we’ll try to set the new land speed record at hopefully around 500 mph.

Next week I’ll be on the nationally syndicated John Boy and Billy radio show to talk about the land speed car and all of the cool stuff we have going on with B.R.A.K.E.S. so make sure you tune-in for that! Also, check out the B.R.A.K.E.S. website, especially if you’re in the Charlotte area, because we’ve added the dates for the driving schools that we’re going to have in Charlotte this year. We’ve also added the safe driving PSAs that we produced for B.R.A.K.E.S. if you want to check those out. The NHRA has agreed to play those on the jumbotron at all of the races for us, so if you’re at the track you’ll be seeing them!

Until next time.