I thought I had better do a little catching up with everyone on the blog. With six races in six weeks I was getting a little burnd out and just couldn’t get myself in the mood to sit down and type some words for everyone. I’ve taken it easy for a couple of days now and decided no better time than now.

Things in Seattle didn’t go quite as planned. I’m sure you have seen by now that we lost our second Impala SS body on the first qualifying run. It looked really bad, but from the drivers seat it was way better than the fire in Englishtown. One big boom and it was pretty much over. Except for not being able to see where I was going after my face shield was covered by oil and fire extinguisher fluid it was pretty easy. One second I had my hand on the chute levers and the next they were gone.

After Seattle we had a new body being shipped to Sonoma but it was rerouted to Long Beach where Roush Industries made some changes to everyone's Impala’s body to strengthen them up in the front end area. As with most new things you develop you’ll find areas that you can make better and after we ran the new body in Sonoma I think our bodies will be much better from now on. We made some big changes to our team after Seattle. We changed our whole engine program over to the combination that Larry Dixon uses in the dragster. It was a big gamble to do that from one race to the next without any testing, but it worked out well. We made three good runs in qualifying and went three rounds on Sunday so I think you can call it a success. We had to do something to try and get ourselves in the top eight before Indy. We have a big challenge ahead of us in the final two races, but I still think we can get it done. We’ll need a little help from some of the other guys and if we can go some rounds it can still happen. If not I guess we didn’t deserve to be in the Countdown for the Championship and we’ll just go out and try to win as many races as we can in the final six events.

After Sonoma we flew back to Denver and picked up the dogs. Melanie’s mom went to a Corvette show that weekend so the puppies stayed with the Omans, who race Comp. eliminator from Denver. We hit the road towards Indy about 1:30 Denver time on Monday. We made it almost to the Colorado state line before the coach was running hot and low on coolant. I pulled over to put some water in it when I saw antifreeze running out from a hose under it. It wasn’t dripping to fast so we decided to try and make it home. Every two or three hundred miles we would stop and put more water in to keep it cool. It was pretty warm out during the day so we decide it would be better to drive as much as we could at night. That meant we would drive straight through from Denver to Indy. We rolled into home about 10:15 Tuesday morning with a little more water running out than when we began. It appeared we made it home just about in time.

We were dragging a little Tuesday, but with being gone so long there where a ton of things to get done so we jumped right in. Melanie’s team is racing the IHRA race this weekend in Martin, Mich., so she had to get stuff done so she could leave again Thursday. I love her and all, but I told her she was on her own this weekend. The dogs and I are going to stay home this weekend and relax. I’m not sure that is the right words because all I have done since she left Thursday is work. I took the coach in Thursday to get the heater hose fixed and we also had a flat tire on our mini so I had to get that fixed, too. I’ve cleaned the house Friday and got the coach picked up. I’m trying to get as much done as possible so when Melanie gets home Sunday night she can relax a little bit instead of having a bunch of stuff to get done.

I went out last night with the neighbors for dinner. Melanie called later last night to give us a report on her qualifying. So far she is fifth with a nice pass on her first attempt. She’ll probably end up winning since we didn’t go with her. Oh well, a win is a win. I’m taking a break from laundry and yard work sitting on the couch watching a little racing on TV. I might head out tonight to a sprint car race with one of my guys Jimmy.

We head out Wednesday for Brainerd and hopefully we can repeat our win from last year again this year. It sure would help our cause for making the top eight. Hope everyone has a good weekend and we’ll see some of you in Brainerd.