Our Vegas week started a little earlier than normal this year. We flew out last Sunday to Vegas and met up with Melanie’s mom, Barb. We made our way to Pahrump, Nev., to attend the Spring Mountain driving school for three days. We had a lot of fun learning car control and some road racing techniques. The first day was spent mostly doing braking and some skid pad stuff. We got to learn the line of the track and get ready for day two. Day two was a little more fun as we got to have more track time and also did some shifting techniques again. Heel and toe shifting is harder than you would think. I broke my ankle when I was a kid, similar to what John Force did, and it just doesn’t bend as well as it should anymore. That made the heel and toe downshifting a little more difficult. I figured it out with some moving of my foot placement.

Melanie and I had to cut out on class a little early on Tuesday because she was doing an autograph session at Simayoff Jewelers from 4-8. We drove the hour back to Vegas, getting there just in time. They decked Mel out in some jewelry (about a half a million dollars worth) while she did her autograph session while I walked around the Venetian shops. I made my way back several times just to make sure she wasn’t thinking of keeping the ring or necklace. Just the two items she was wearing was that much money. They were beautiful, but out of our price league. We left Vegas about 8:30 and headed back to Pahrump to meet Barb for a late dinner of pizza in the hotel restaurant.

Our final day at the driving school was fun. We got open track time without following an instructor. The staff at Spring Mountain was great to work with and very helpful with tips for making us faster and more accurate in our line on the track. I really enjoyed a new challenge of road racing. Also the Corvette C-06s were a lot of fun to play in for three days. After class ended we drove to Vegas and checked in to the New York New York Hotel before heading out to dinner. Mel had made reservations at the Capitol Grill for my birthday dinner. It was Sunday so we took time to celebrate it on Wednesday night with a great meal.

There wasn’t much on our schedule for the day on Thursday so Melanie and I took advantage of the 15 percent off of the New York New York spa Thursday by getting a massage. It felt good after three days of driving a car that I wasn’t used to and used to using muscles I don’t normally use. I kept bracing myself in the corners with me legs and my knees were pretty beat by the end. Thursday night we both had appearances to do. I went to a Budweiser/Monster bowling tournament with Brandon Bernstein with some radio contest winners at the Rio. We had a lot of fun doing something different. We had a four-frame bowling challenge, with Brandon coming out on top by one pin over me and my team. Melanie did an autograph session at the Palms with a bunch of other NHRA drivers. After she finished she drove to the Rio picked me up and we headed back to the Venetian to go to the Wayne Brady show. I can honestly say I haven’t laughed that hard for quite some time. If you are in Vegas and want to see a show, I highly recommend the Wayne Brady show.

Vegas is usually a very good race for me, but this year it didn’t turn out quite as well as I wanted. The Funny Car class this year is in turmoil trying to figure out how to make the cars run with the added weight. We got in the top 12 on Friday and it was a nice going into Saturday with less pressure. Especially after we had problems on our third qualifying run and caught the car on fire. I wasn’t expecting that, especially that early in the run, but we recovered well and made a good solid fourth session. It was all most worth celebrating after qualifying since it was the first time this year that both Melanie and I qualified to race on Sunday. Thankfully it was on opposite sides of the ladder.

Sunday didn’t work out to well for either one of us. We had engine problems and were outrun by Ashley Force first round and Melanie’s car smoked the tires in her loss to Bob Tasca. It was good to see Tim Wilkerson win on Sunday because he has had a long dry spell. Kind of seems to be a trend this year seeing new winners who haven’t won in a while. We were going to test on Monday after the race but learned that there was an open test session at ORP in Indy Thursday this week before the Divisision 3 race so we loaded up and the guys headed back to Indy so we could do our testing at home. Sounds like it was a good idea as it was pretty warm on Monday in Vegas and most of the teams that stayed and tested struggled with the track conditions. We don’t run in that kind of atmospheric conditions very much so we thought our testing would suit us better to test in conditions like we are going to run in for the majority of the summer. Melanie and I had a flight out Monday night so we spent the day hanging out at the new outdoor mall close to the airport doing a little shopping and having lunch at an outside patio enjoying the nice weather before heading back to Indy.

I’m writing the blog as I set out at ORP while we test. We planned on making as many runs as possible on Thursday, but that plan would change after our first run. I made a half-track shut off run with no problems but all that changed as I was coasting in the shutdown area. We had a bearing go out of the fuel pump, causing it to overheat and ignite the fuel fumes as I coasted. I was half way down the shut down area when we the fumes ignited and blew up the fuel tank and the car caught fire. Not good since we had just had a fire three runs before. It really caught me off guard. You expect things like that happen under power or just as you shut off, but not after you shut off at halftrack and are coasting in the shutdown area. I pulled the fire bottles and got the car stopped as soon as possible. I have to commend the ORP safety crew. I jumped out and ran around to the front of the car to try and get the body up to save it from further damage. As soon as I lifted the body the fire crew was there spraying the car down. We towed back to the pits to access the damage and find the problem. After several hours of work and problem found we finally rolled up for a second run around 7 o’clock. It didn’t go as well as we had liked so we are still out here today going to make another attempt. They are going to allow us to make a pass when they have some down time today so we are going to try it again. Melanie and Frank Hawley also did some testing here yesterday. I saw this morning that Frank’s team is still here with us today, but Mel is home trying to get caught up on some work.

Hopefully today goes better than yesterday. I tried to look at yesterday as a blessing. Atlanta is one of those races that everything that can go wrong does for me. I’ve been upside down, on fire, blow the back of my dragster off and had several dnq’s there so maybe yesterday we got some of the bad luck out of our system before heading to Atlanta. I figured that if we didn’t run yesterday, the fuel pump would have caused us the same problems the first run in Atlanta and my black cloud there would have continued.

Hope everyone has a good weekend and hopefully we have a good and uneventful day of testing today. Check in with you later.