Greetings from gate B-13 at Richmond International Airport. My flight is scheduled to leave in about an hour, and I'm so tired I'm having a hard time concentrating, much less keeping my eyes open, but I wanted to fire off a mini-blog just to check in with all of you.

Let's get right to the heart of the matter... We had a TERRIFIC weekend in Richmond. Friday was kind of just okay, and we actually fell completely out of the top 12 in the second session, so we went into Saturday with no official time, as part of the "also ran" group. There were 18 Funny Cars in Richmond, so we knew we had to outrun two cars to make sure we were in, but boy did we do better than that.

Tim got an instant handle on things, and our two Saturday runs were, as a tandem, among our best laps of the year. We were 2nd after the first Saturday run, then had been knocked down to 7th by the time we made the last pass. So... We just plowed our way right back up the sheet to the 4th spot, and we even earned a total of four of the new qualifying bonus points. We all felt pretty good about our chances on Sunday morning...

Round one: We were low e.t. of the round. Round two: We were low e.t. of the round. Semifinal: We were low e.t. of the round. In a row, we took out Cruz Pedregon, Robert Hight, and Mike Neff, and none of the races were really close. Earlier in the day, I had looked at the ladder to try to grab a prediction of how things might go, and one of my thoughts included the fact we might run my buddy Del in the final. Bingo!

At that point, we were outrunning everyone and had made five consecutive near-perfect laps. If we went out there and just repeated, we felt we'd win. Well, apparently we weren't meant to run six consecutive near-perfect laps, because we hurt a piston early in the run, then knocked an oil line off and made a mess of things while Del went past to take a big win.

Disappointed? Sure. We could taste the win, believe me, and the car was so strong we all were very confident, but we all also knew that anything can happen with these machines...

I'm sure I'll write much more about it once I get home and get some sleep, but the bottom line is we won three rounds, moved up to 5th in the points, and kept ourselves alive in the Countdown. We're up against a steep mountain, with four great cars ahead of us, but at least we're alive... And we're running well.... Anything can happen.

We had lots of other fun highlights I can write about later this week, but one of the biggest was our special guest on Sunday. On Friday, I got an email from Bob Vandergriff asking if a good friend of his could be included on our Sunday hospitality list, to come in and enjoy some of the action right in our pit. As he put it "I thought of you because of who he is, and I thought you might enjoy meeting him. He's Justin Verlander from the Detroit Tigers." Cool!

Justin Verlander, in case you haven't been paying attention to the American League recently, is one of the best pitchers in all of baseball. He's the Tigers ace, and he has absolutely nasty stuff.

Justin brought his mom, dad, and brother to the game, and they all came by to hang out with us and get up close for our first warm-up of the day. Justin got his first official "face full" of nitro, and was simultaneously laughing and crying. My guess is that about 99 percent of you can relate to that!

Anyway, he's a great guy and it was a real pleasure to have the Verlander family with us. Maybe we'll see Justin again, someday, at another race... Seeing as how he's the best pitcher in the American League Central, I know I'll be seeing much more of him on TV and at the ballpark.

Rob Flynn just stopped by to chat, here in the gate area. I guess it's a good thing my trip home goes through Detroit, because there are a bunch of Delta travelers over at the next two gates, all trying to get home through Atlanta, and it's apparently not going well for any of them. Annette came by a few minutes ago, and said that their flight is delayed, the next flight is delayed, and earlier this morning they were here when Dave Jacobsen got on his flight but didn't leave for more than an hour, and he only had a one-hour layover at ATL... Yuck...

So far, my flight is listed as on-time, and my one-hour layover in Detroit looks safe..

Hey, cool. Just got a text message from Del saying "Fun race yesterday. I knew eventually it would come down to us in a final round"

I messaged him back and just told him that he and his team earned every bit of that one...

Well, I'm too tired to write any more. Can I just twitch my nose or blink my eyes and be home? If it were only that easy...

Wilber, out!