Last night at the Pomona Valley Mining Company restaurant, we had our now annual dinner with the fine folks at Mac Tools to kick off what hopes to be another successful and exciting season on the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series tour. All of the usual suspects were there...all of the Mac Tools dragster team as well as Roger, Tony, Karla, Carrie, Tom, and Brian from Mac Tools. I'd like to say thank you here to everyone at PVMC for all of the great food and great service. Everyone there genuinely enjoyed themselves, (well, maybe the wine had something to do with that...) and a grand time was had by all.

Now, last year at this very same event in the same locale the staff at Mac Tools handed out t-shirts to all of the attendees with a message on the front to identify its occupier. Kalitta Motorsports had grown and changed between the 2005 and 2006 seasons, so this was their way of making sure that everyone there was familiar with everyone else's name. This year the great minds at Mac Tools decided to do something similar but also in that process shine a spotlight on one of the best traditions in drag racing: the nickname. So, everyone was handed their appropriate shirt upon entering with their nickname on the front. Some were readily obvious and others were a bit obscure, but I noticed that this simple gesture of nicknames brought so much more energy to the room and the conversations. NHRA drag racing needs nicknames. It needs rivalries built around those nicknames. It just adds a level of excitement and fan interaction that is invaluable. Snake vs. Mongoose, the Bounty H unter vs. Big Daddy, etc.

For those of you who have witnessed the recent banter between me and fellow blogger Bob Wilber over at the Team CSK blog, the attached photograph may be a bit confusing. It is a photo of the shirt with my nickname that I received at last night's festivities. Yes, it does say that my nickname is "BW," which only by sheer coincidence are the initials of my scribing friend. So to clarify so that Mr. Wilber does not get mistakenly flattered that I am being compared to him in some way, in this case, the "BW" stands for Big Words. Apparently to some I have a loquacious penchant for a more varicose and verbose vernacular, but I really don't understand what they mean.

This just in: As fate would have it or just another coincidence, about an hour after I passed the nickname blog along to NHRA.com "Big Daddy" Don Garlits was strolling through the pits here at the Winternationals and decided to stop by our Team Kalitta pit area and have a chat about drag racing then and now with Connie "the Bounty Hunter" Kalitta. I just happened to be there with camera in tow, and boy I'm glad I was.

Todd