Once again I have chosen, what has become the most common place for me to write my blogs, the airport. At this moment I am in Baltimore, Terminal B. I left Indianapolis Tuesday morning, destination, Ohio. After a couple days and nights of GE business, I packed and began the trip to Virginia Beach to touch base with our sponsors. My connecting flight is scheduled to leave in a couple hours, so I grabbed a quick bite to eat, and a healthy walk around the airport before I sat down to scribe.
Taking you back almost a week, we had a great time in Indianapolis. I flew in Tuesday evening and spent Wednesday working at the racetrack. Gary, always the early one, had the transporter parked, and by 11 a.m. the pit was set up. Good timing because the NHRA POWERade Press conference, in Downtown Indy, was scheduled to begin at noon on Wednesday. Not realizing that we had to stop and get gas, and then, of course, search out a parking spot, we arrived about 15 minutes late. We did however catch the big news about the added bike race, and the Countdown to the Championship. I have to applaud NHRA and POWERade for their ability to keep that a secret. Most announcements like that seem to leak out on chat pages over the Internet and such. It may have, but I didn’t hear it.
After the press conference, the guys and girls split up as Gary went to pick Scott up from the airport, while Debbie and I did some shopping. That evening we met up and headed to Ray Skillman’s Classic Car Business for a Bar-b-q that Wesley Wells had invited us to. What a great time we had. Don’t quote me, but I believe there were over 240 pristine classic cars, artistically arranged by manufacturer and style. We each had our favorite that we spent most of the night ogling over, (including some of NHRA’s finest in the tech department). It was a great evening of food, fun and friends, as well as a couple of trips down memory lane.
Moving on to Thursday, I spent the day working away in the lounge of the transporter. We had made dinner reservations for Thursday night at St. Elmo’s, a wonderful steak house in downtown Indy. It’s becoming a ritual for us to go there now. We made friends with one waiter and his family and now we make a special trip to see him. Dinner was wonderful, as usual. For those of you who have a passion for shrimp cocktail with a deliciously potent horseradish sauce, you have to visit St. Elmo’s. It’s the best.
Pulling up to the staging lanes on Friday we had the opportunity to watch Extreme motocross. I attached some pictures.
If you watched the ESPN2 coverage of the race, then you may know that Friday was a great day for the GEICO Motorcycle team. We found ourselves, for the first time, in the No. 1 qualifying spot. Testing really did help up this year. Gary had the tune up nailed, and gave me a great bike. It lasted for a day until Matt Smith put down a beautiful 6.99 pass, reducing the remaining spots in the “6 Second club” by one. Congrats Matt!
We finished the qualifying in 3rd, when Andrew Hines went around us, and we still have a good start in the Ringer Glove points battle for 2007, a race that we have not yet competed in, but desperately hope to next season.
We’ll the rest of the weekend was played out on ESPN2 so I won’t repeat it. We had a good race and lost to Angelle in the second round.
Now, on to Reading.