Well, it's been a little while since I last blogged so I'll get ya back up to speed. First of all, the Sunday before St. Louis, my daughter and I actually won the first golf tournament we ever played in together. It was a big surprise to me since my daughter is nine and really doesn't play golf. Plus the fact that the tournament was a straight scotch tournament which means you only play one ball and alternate shots. It was a nice experience and for those of you that have kids, you'll understand.
After that I left on Tuesday to fly in early for the St. Louis race. We had a display to do for DHL at Scott Air Force base on the Wednesday. When we got there I was really amazed how the base is like a little self contained city. Fast food places, movie theatres and even a golf course! We had a few guests from DHL there as well as many from the military. We even had Major General William Johnson there from USTRANSCOM and Brigadier General Taco Gilbert. After we gave everybody a Kalitta-style warm up, including a few throttle whacks, we let both Generals hop in for their turn. Now I know they have done some cool things in their time, but they both thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the DHL Toyota with it running on nitro...I mean who wouldn't, right?
Our whole team then got a tour of what I would call the "logistics" building. The Tanker Airlift Control Center (TACC), Headquarters Air Mobility Command, located at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., is the command’s hub for planning and directing tanker and transport aircraft operations around the world. Created to centralize command and control responsibilities previously located in the numbered air forces and airlift divisions they coordinate shipments around the world as well as things like planning all of Air Force One's trips. Let's say a "War Fighter" in Iraq needs parts for their vehicles. He places an order to TACC, then they have to get it to him in the allocated amount of time. They find where the parts are and then figure out how to get them there. This is called a "mission." Do you know how many missions they average in a year? One mission, every minute, of everyday, 24/7. That's a lot of missions. I had no idea, and the control room I saw looked like something out of a James Bond movie with huge screens everywhere tracking air and sea movements. My hat's off to our military, that's for sure, and it was an honor to go there.
The weather was a little touch and go on Friday, with NHRA finally pulling the plug Friday afternoon. Of course like any racer or crew member knows, 30 minutes later, it will stop raining and the sun will come out...and this was no exception. When you come to a race and there are only 16 cars there, the crew chiefs are licking their chops knowing they are basically going to have a few test runs on a National Event prepped track without the fear of DNQ'ing. Unfortunately Mother Nature intervened and we were down to two runs. We set our car up the same as first round in Atlanta and for some reason it smoked the tires almost instantly. Then of course the guys have to back it down a bit just to go down the track. We tried and it made it to almost half track before tire smoke. Sunday we just wanted to go A-B, and we did that, but it was a lot slower than we had anticipated. We ran Matt Hagan and all he did was run low ET of the race next to us. Luck has not really been our friend this year but as our Co- Crew Chief Nicky says, if you keep making deposits into the "Luck Bank" sooner or later you'll get to make some withdrawals! Later Sunday night I got to celebrate with my buddy Del Worsham. Del is a great driver and a great friend and I was very happy to see him and the whole Al-Anabi team win.
Bristol is coming up in a week and a half and I am sure that I will have a few good stories from there. We really need to get our car running better though. Englishtown is coming up and it is going to be super emotional for everybody on our team. I want to make sure that we have a great showing there...actually I really want to win that race. One thing I know for sure though is that Jon O, Nicky and the entire Kalitta team wants nothing more than for that to happen and we will do everything in our power to get our DHL Toyota back up to speed.
Talk to you later.