Greetings from Atlanta Dragway! As I started this little ditty of words, the furious fiddle work of Charlie Daniels in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” began to pour out of the speakers on our Mac Tools/DHL hospitality bus. A big smile of coincidence found its way to my face, and the extra shot of inspiration I needed to accompany my morning jitter juice got my toes to tapping and my fingers to pecking out this pseudo tribute to a classic of American cinema.

In 1977, theaters across the United States and later the world were graced with the presence of Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Sally Field and the late, great Jackie Gleason in the terrifically campy homage to truckin’ and bootleggin’, Smokey and the Bandit. For those of you unfortunate enough not to have seen this spectacle of the silver screen, the crux of the comedic calamities involves the Bandit, Snowman, and Frog trying to win a bet by transporting 400 cases of Coors beer, which at the time was illegal to be taken east of Texas, from Texarkana to Atlanta in 28 hours while being feverishly chased by a Smokey. I don’t want to go into further details because if you have not seen it, go rent it ASAP!

So, every time we go racing near the crown jewel of the Peach State, I can’t help but think of the hilarious hijinks of one of my favorite movies, which is also a favorite of two of my Team Kalitta teammates. Chris “Beaker” Glass, bottom-end and short block specialist on Hillary’s dragster, is one of those people you meet who seems to be able to quote every line from every movie he’s ever seen. Since “Smokey and the Bandit” is one of his favorites, he keeps me consistently chuckling when I stop by the motor room at the race shop every so often for a dose of Beaker’s “Banditisms”. Troy “T-Roy” Fasching, blower and ignition specialist and assistant crew chief on the lovely and talented Miss Will’s ride, is also a big fan of the flick, so when Troy told me he was going to drive to Atlanta in one of the team’s new Toyota Sequoias, I offered to join him for the journey with thoughts of the Bandit and Snowman burning rubber and slinging gravel began spinning the wheels of the black Trans-Am in my head.

Troy and I left Ypsilanti, which for the sake of this exposition shall be known as Ypsarkana, with our valuable payload, which was not 400 cases of beer but instead a new blower for HW’s rail, to begin our southbound and down trip Wednesday afternoon. The great folks at Toyota recently sent us two new Sequoias and a new Tundra pick-up, so the real purpose of the trip was two-fold – delivering the fresh supercharger and getting one of the Sequoias into Team Kalitta’s motor pool of support vehicles, but in the fantasyland that is this writer’s brain, it was something completely different. For the first leg of the trip, Troy assumed the role of the Bandit. So, I guess that would make me Frog, but for the sake of my manhood let’s just say I was Snowman, or Troy was Snowman and I was Fred, his Basset Hound, anyway…I digress. Our ride in the Sequoia was assuredly far more comfortable than that of our cinematic counterparts. One of the really cool things about riding shotgun for the first stanza was getting to play with the built-in navigation system. I think Troy would have rather had Fred quietly snoozing next to him than me drooling all over the shiny buttons and continuously exclaiming, “That’s cool! I wonder what this button does?”

We didn’t have any sightings of Jackie Gleason’s Smokey, but we did see plenty of his fellow brother law officers…and I mean plenty! There was a stretch through Ohio where it seemed that we spotted a bubble gum machine every other mile. Besides frequently seeing our friends in the medians with the radar guns, it was an uneventful and smooth trip until I got to take over the controls as the Bandit, or Snowman…whichever you prefer, somewhere in Northern Kentucky and Troy took over as Fred to paw at the navigation system. We stopped in Knoxville, Tenn., or Mecca to a Volunteer fan like me, to rest for the night and quote lines from our muse before laughing ourselves to sleep.

Troy took over the controls as “Bandman”, my very un-imaginative attempt to combine the two characters, the next morning for the final loaded-up-and-truckin’ jaunt to Atlanta Dragway. Somewhere very close to the Atlanta city limits, one last notion of being just like our fictional heroes popped into my daredevil brain cells when we drove up behind a ramp, cleverly disguised as a car hauler. I turned to Bandman and said, “The Bandit would find a way to jump that ramp, ya know.” Troy gave me a look as if I did indeed have long, floppy ears and then laughed. We made our way up I-85 to unload our precious cargo, and the drive and the daydreaming were done. The trip was a lot of fun, and I want to take this sentence to say thanks to T-Roy for making it so…10-4, good buddy!

Fred has left the building.