Hey blog fans … Jim “O” here. One of the questions I get asked all of the time when fans or fellow racers see me or my teammates waiting at the airport to board a flight is, “Don’t you fly in with Connie?” or “Doesn’t Connie let you use one of his planes?” The answer to both of these is no. Connie and Doug usually fly in on Friday and then fly out on Sunday mere minutes after the last Kalitta car has made its way down the track, unless of course one of our cars is in the winner’s circle. This makes it hard for me to fly with them because I like to be there looking at track conditions or weather conditions. Connie and Doug would rather have their planes filled with cargo or paying customers rather than giving us a cool plane to fly into the races with. We here at Kalitta Motorsports and KB Racing, LLC can’t afford to charter jets to go to the races in.



With the ever increasing cost of jet fuel, (which I hear about quite frequently from Connie) the cost of a plane ticket has gone through the roof. Since Northwest Airlines has a hub at Detroit Metro Airport, we usually can get non-stop tickets at a good deal. For Houston, our driver, Hillary Will, who also doubles as the KB Racing, LLC team travel agent, could not find anything cheap so she had to get creative. Our flight down to Houston was non-stop and a piece of cake, our flight back to Detroit was another story…



After getting up at 3:15 a.m. on Monday morning and meeting Hillary in the hotel lobby at 4:00 a.m., we made our way to Houston George Bush Airport for our 6:20 a.m. flight to Memphis. After flying with a bunch of happy Memphis Tiger fans we landed at about 7:50 a.m. and then made a mad dash for our gate on the other side of the Memphis airport for our next flight to Washington DC, which departed at 8:26 a.m. After standing around for about 30 minutes, they started to call for the flight attendants which had yet to show up. After about another 30-minute wait the flight attendants to show up, we finally boarded the plane. We figured that since we were about an hour late taking off from Memphis that there would be no way we would make it to DC for our next connection. Once we landed in DC at about 12:30 p.m., we just knew we would miss our next flight, which was due to take off at 12:37 p.m. Miracles do happen. The nice folks at Northwest Airlines decided to wait for us. After getting scolded by the gate agent to hurry up and get on the plane, we hurried to our seats for our next flight to Detroit. After sitting there for about another 15 minutes because they were supposedly loading OUR luggage, we took off for Detroit. Amazingly enough our flight arrived about 10 minutes early.





Once off the plane, we made our way down to baggage claim to pick up our bags. After waiting about 45 minutes, it became apparent that our bags didn’t make it. After spending some quality time with the Northwest baggage representative to give a detailed description of our bags and our home addresses, my wife, Tammy, picked us up at around 3:30 p.m., and we headed to the race shop. After trying to stay up and watch WWE Raw and see the Wrestlemania results, I fell asleep at about 9:30 p.m., only to be awakened by the Northwest baggage delivery service at 12:45 a.m., who was thankfully dropping off my bag. Of course, I couldn’t go back to sleep for about another three hours, but at least I had my bag.



Looking back, it was kind of fun and at least we accumulated those valuable Northwest Elite miles, but the most important thing was that we saved our team owner Ken Black about $450, which after our nice fireball on Saturday at Houston could buy three new Childs & Albert connecting rods. I’ll bet that Ken, Hillary and I, along with many others, would have each donated $450 to have that nice bump fixed in the right lane.



Thanks for reading.