Hi all you Kalitta Motorsports fans! Jeff Arend checking back in. It has been a while since I last blogged and a lot of cool stuff has happened since then.

Indy started off great with a picture-perfect run down the center of the lane. Did I mention that we were the first car to go down the track? It was very emotional for all involved, and spectators as well as other drivers and their crew members talked to me about what it meant for them to see the DHL Toyota Funny Car back on the track again. I have to admit that I am usually not a very emotional person, but it really hit me hard after I got back to the lounge after that first run.

The rest of the weekend did not go quite as well and we ended up missing qualifying by a scant one hundredth of a second. After the race we decided to go testing again to work out some of the new car bugs and work on the car set up.

Testing went well and we steadily improved every lap and the things that Glenn and the boys were working on were showing great promise. I even got to make a couple of short laps in Grubby’s Top Fuel car! It was kind of funny how that all came about. The long story short was that at Indy Connie asked me if I had ever driven a Top Fuel car. to which I replied no. Actually I had only made three runs in any kind of dragster in my life! So anyways, Connie says, "Hey come over here and sit in Grubby’s car." So I get in and he says, “What do ya think, kid?”, to which I reply, “I can reach everything but I can’t see over the dash! I will be okay if you get me a phone book to sit on.” Let’s just say that if you ever see me and Grubnic standing side by side, you are not going to confuse us as brothers! He is only about a foot taller than me. Connie then says “Alright, you want to make a few runs in it on Wednesday when you are testing your car?” After I pinched myself to make sure it was real, I said “No problem, sounds like fun to me.” And there you have the whole story.

Charlotte was an awesome race. The facility is second to none, and if some of you are looking at even just one race to go to, make sure you move this one to the top of the list! Our DHL Toyota just kept running better and better and we lost a close one to Robert Hight in the first round. Dallas was next and I always enjoy racing there. Again our car ran great but we missed being in the top half of the field by a hundredth of a second which lost us lane choice. This proved to be the difference as we ran the quickest lap of the first round in the right lane and again got narrowly beat by last year's Champion, Tony P.

Let’s just say that the next race, Memphis didn’t go nearly as smoothly. It started off fun, Thursday night at Coyote Ugly on Beale Street with a NHRA autograph session. We smoked the tires on the first lap and then Glenn Mikres made a good call on the tune-up Friday night as we got safely in the show. We were a little more conservative than we wanted to be because of that first run. On Q3 we smoked the tires again, but saw some things similar to the first run where it smoked the tires for no real reason. Everybody put their heads together and figured out a problem that may have been plaguing us a little from time to time, so that was great. On Q4 it was running pretty well and for no real reason blew up pretty good just before half track. All the new safety features that Glenn and the team came up with worked great and the parachutes deployed and the ignition and fuel were shut off all automatically with out any driver input from me. From what I hear, NHRA will make this mandatory very soon and I know that this is going to save a lot of other drivers in the future. Sunday morning, I’ll just say that the car ran great and the crew did a great job. The driver (me) didn’t fare as well and in one of those instances that I used to teach everybody at Frank Hawley’s drag racing school not to do, I did. I got distracted a bit and looked over to see if Mike Neff had staged yet, which my brain told me NOT to do but my eyes went there by themselves! Long story short, I was a few hundredths late on the light, and while I am not sure we would have won even with my normal light, I know it would have been a lot closer!

Richmond is this weekend, the car is running well and I am going to be looking for a little retribution. There’s no telling what’s going to happen!

Jeff