I’m home, in my office, and Norwalk (get it? “Thou shalt not run, nor walk”) is officially in the books and part of history. It’s been a few days since I wrote the last blog installment, so I actually had to go back and read the last one to see where I left off, and I was pleased to remember I wrote that one on Saturday, so not that much time has passed. Guess I wasn’t as guilty as I was feeling.

Here’s one thing I love about Minnesota. In most parts of the country right now, when it’s almost July, you have basically no chance of getting a respite from the summer weather. If you’re in Texas or Oklahoma or Florida or basically anywhere east, south, or in the middle, it’s going to be hot. Period. It should be hot here, too, but what’s good is that it doesn’t have to be and you really never know what you’re going to get. Right now we have a funny little low pressure area over us, it’s a bit overcast, it’s breezy, and it actually feels sorta nice and chilly outside. It feels more like a fall day than a summer one. By Thursday, we’re supposed to be back to normal, but it sure felt nice to step off the plane at MSP yesterday and feel cool dry air, instead of feeling like you were walking into some sort of humid oven.

Okay, back to where we left off… When I last blogged in your general direction, I mentioned that Friday had been our worst single day of the year, in terms of how we did on the track. Saturday wasn’t any better. It wasn’t just us, since basically everyone was having trouble with the hot, tricky track, but we managed to compound things by not making much of a good pass on Friday night, and frankly we were a bit lucky to qualify 16th. I’ll say this: One year ago, if we had run the same way, we would not have made the race. With the economy keeping a few good teams on the sidelines, we had a little more leeway, but we still had to beat one car to get in (since there were 17 at Norwalk), and it was a relief to do so.

Tim said he laid awake most of the night, trying to figure it out before Sunday morning, and through all of that mental analysis he felt he had a decent handle on where we were going wrong. At that point, after our lousy qualifying effort and knowing that we had to run Mike Neff, the No. 1 qualifier, in round one, Tim made a conscious decision to change the approach for the opening round, and it’s one I don't think a lot of crew chiefs would have the guts or foresight to make. I was really impressed with his approach and his demeanor about it.

Basically, because of the hole we were in, he looked at the first round more as a test lap for the future, rather than a “be all, end all, nothing matters more” lap against Neff, where winning could be the only good outcome. Most guys would throw everything they had at it and then, of course, most likely smoke the tires and lose. Tim, instead, decided to put his new ideas in place, race the track instead of the opponent, and make sure the car went A-to-B, so if Neff’s car had any issues, maybe we’d even win the lap. If not, we’d probably lose, but we’d gain in the long run by getting the tune-up back in order, which is way better than learning nothing because you’re trying to be a hero by doing something crazy or taking a complete shot in the dark.

As it turned out, he was absolutely right. Zippy ran low e.t. of the round, so he obviously didn’t have any problems, but the LRS car went right down there too, running a 4.322 that wasn’t good enough to win, but it was our best lap of a very tough weekend, and on top of that, it was good enough to beat a lot of people out there in round one, just not the top qualifier. Tim has an amazing ability to see the bigger picture and to not let a moment like that dictate what he does or how he approaches things. After the run, he was in great spirits because the car behaved like it was supposed to, his late-night mental gyrations had solved the problems, and we had our hot rod back again. Basically, he took one for the team in the here-and-now to make us better down the road. It may look like an “L” in the scorebook, but almost like a sacrifice bunt, it helped move the team into better scoring position.

What made things tougher on Sunday was the wacky weather. When we got out to the track, it was cloudy and breezy and still plenty humid. We warmed the car up, then Tim and I headed over to the pre-race driver introductions, and once that was complete, we took our time but headed straight back to the pit area. Anyone who didn’t do that got very wet.

Right as we walked back into our pit it started to rain, and within a few seconds it was legitimately pouring. Everyone was dashing for cover but a lot of folks got drenched, and I quickly moved my computer away from the edge of the awning, while I also got online to take a look at the live radar image. At first, I thought the shower was the first of two bands of rain, but after zooming in on the unfamiliar geography, we were all happy to see that this particular storm was actually the final band of rain, and it looked like there would be nothing behind it once it moved through.

Sure enough, just a few minutes later, the rain stopped and the back edge of the storm passed overhead, leaving nothing but blue skies and a few fluffy white clouds in its wake. Boom, over. It got a bit steamy, of course, as the sun came back out and baked the track, the pits, and the people, but that also helped the Safety Safari get the track dry in record time. They did it so fast, nobody could really make any substantial changes to their tune-ups, and pretty soon we were on our way back up there again, to race for real.

As reported, we came in second in a two-car race, but our teammate Bob Tasca III scratched and clawed his way to a victory over Matt Hagan, so there was still plenty of adrenalin in our pit area. Bob (aka BT3) then went on to win two more rounds before losing to “Fast Jack” in the final, and he picked a great day to do that, since a group of very important Ford executives were with us and watching. Talk about perfect timing!

In the LRS pit, once round two was over and I was wrapping up my post- event report, part of our team got to work on taking down the circus, while a few of the guys went over to help the Tasca team any way they could. I got my stuff written, wrapped up, and put away, and then we all dove into the process that has to occur once the racing is over. By the time the final round was set to run, we had everything taken down, pulled apart, and the whole LRS pit packed away. The good part about that was that it allowed me to go up to the line for the final, but the bad part was we then had to check the time to pinpoint the exact moment, one hour later, when we could bring the support trailer into the pits to load everything up. Until then, we could only just sit there, with awning poles, tables, chairs, and everything else just laying there on the ground. Well, okay, we could do more than just sit there. We also stood around. And we told some stories. And we ate some beef jerky.

Exactly 60 minutes later, Jeff pulled up to the pit with the trailer, and by then even some of Tasca’s guys jumped in to help us load everything up. That was pretty cool of them, considering they’d just lost in the final, but they’re all really good guys (I know that first- hand, of course, since they’re mostly ex-teammates of mine) so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them come over and grab our stuff to help us load it up. Dave and I got out of there by about 8:00 (talk about a long day!) and headed back to the hotel to clean up quickly so that we could find some dinner.

Apparently, they roll the sidewalks up early in Willard, Ohio. We had places like McDonald’s and Taco Bell as a fallback, so we weren’t going to starve, but most of the sit-down restaurants were closed. The one local Mexican place was still open, although it was about 8:45 when we walked in and they were already getting a jump on their own version of a “tear down” before their posted 9 p.m. closing time, stacking chairs on tables and sweeping the floors. They were kind enough to take our money, though, so they seated us and we wolfed down a couple of enchiladas and a fine bowl of queso with chorizo as fast as we could. In just a couple of hours I’d gone from trying to write a coherent wrap-up story with tables and chairs being folded up around me to trying to eat dinner with the exact same thing going on.

To cap it off, we had also gotten back to our lovely hotel to find that the housekeeping staff had felt it completely unnecessary to clean our rooms. Perfect!

Anyway, Dave and I planned to leave the hotel at 8:00 in the morning, which gave us far more than enough time to get to the Cleveland airport for our 11:55 flight, but we figured the trip was long enough that we should build in some cushion, in case we ran into any traffic tie-ups on the 60-mile jaunt, or in case the airport was a zoo.

We have now coined a new term for situations like that. We have dubbed it the “Reverse Murphy’s Law.” If you prepare for things to go wrong, they don’t. We hit no traffic, walked right onto the rental car bus as the driver waited for us, got checked in and handed over our bags in no time at all, and then sailed right through security without a hitch. And by then, it was all of about 10:15. One thing we did see, though, was yet another sign of the impending Delta Airlines apocalypse. For the first time since the merger, we walked up to the Northwest counter to find it closed, with nothing more than a couple of signs posted there to steer us over to the Delta counter.

Once on the concourse, with so much time to kill, we found a Continental President’s Club and hung out there for a bit, and when we checked in at the desk we found out we’ll only be able to use Continental’s clubs until October. After that, there will really be no more Northwest, so there will be no more Northwest/Continental partnership with their clubs. The world is changing all around me, and I want to call a time-out.

We got to the gate about 15 minutes before boarding, and we weren’t there for more than a minute when the Worsham clan came walking by. Connie and the girls, Kate and Maddy, had joined Del for the weekend, and they all stayed at Kalahari, the huge water park resort and hotel in Sandusky, which was probably about the coolest thing in the whole wide world as far as the twins were concerned. At some juncture they went up to Cedar Point as well, because both girls were carrying huge stuffed animals that were about as big as them. They told us they’d gotten them free because they’d won them at the amusement park, and both Del and Connie laughed and said “Yeah, those free animals cost about 40 bucks each, let me tell you.” When they headed down the concourse to their gate, I only wished I’d have had the camera ready because it would’ve been such a great shot. Both girls were carrying their big animals, and Del was pulling their little pink roller bag behind him. You had to see it to appreciate it…

Well, what else?

Before the race, I flew down on the same flight with Nelly, my ESPN camera-operator buddy who lives in Winnipeg and is therefore often on the same plane I’m on. He, of course, told Dana (my other ESPN camera-operator buddy) that I’d taken a pic of him on the plane, and that started the whole Nelly/Dana blog photo competition that’s been going on for a couple of years now. Those two are pretty classic, and I think they keep a running score of who’s been on the blog the most, and they take great delight in razzing me or stirring up trouble when they think they’ve been slighted, in terms of appearances here. Today, in the second photo gallery, I’ll make sure it’s a tie and put one of each of them in there.

Oh, and Rachel Wilkerson was also with us all weekend, which was great. Since she’s only been to a couple of races this year, we’re just now really getting to know each other, and the more time I spend with Rachel the more I like her. She always seemed like such a great kid, and what do you know… She is!

Our new tradition now is that, no matter how the car runs on any given lap, I’ll say “Way to go, Rachel” when we get back. It’s either a serious “Way to go” if we run well, or a sarcastic version if we don’t run well. And I taught her one of our old starting line ritual handshake deals too… It’s the one Chase Steele and I always used to do (and coincidentally, Chase was at the race with his dad and it was GREAT to see both of them), and it goes like this: You start with a high-five, but you keep going after slapping hands to bring your hands down to the bottom, where you do a reverse “low five” there. You’re side-by-side then, so you immediately pivot your arms back up at the elbow and pat the other person on the back of the shoulder, with the back of your hand, two times quickly. Then, just as you make the second backhanded pat on the back, you jump away from each other. Rachel nailed it, so now we have that going for us, which is nice. LOL…

Plus, once I got home yesterday I had an “friend invite” to join Rachel’s Facebook page, so now we’re all dialed-in on that too. We’re pals!

Oh yeah, one other thing happened yesterday. As mentioned in earlier blogs, it was our prescribed day to select our seats at brand-spanking-new Target Field for the 2010 Minnesota Twins season. I was home in time to do it, but Barbara had gotten all prepared and was all over it, so I let her do the deed at the precise moment our slot arrived (3:12 p.m.) on the seat selection website. She’d been analyzing all the options, and we talked a number of times on the phone about what the approach should be, so when it came time to pick our seats she was all buttoned up and prepared. Basically, we gave up some rows to be higher in Section 103, and that allowed us to get seats 1 and 2, right on the aisle. So that’s us: Section 103, Row 36, Seats 1 and 2.

The way the park is designed, there’s no overhang from the deck above in this part of the stadium, so we’ll be able to look straight up and see the sky, but we’re only going to be four rows from the top. Being on the aisle is great, because you can dash up to the concourse any time you want without having to inconvenience anyone by making them stand up to let you out. We’ll be able to get to the concession stands, get to the bathrooms, get dry, or get warm, in a jiffy. I put a schematic of Target Field in the second photo gallery, with our section highlighted in blue (down the right field line, three sections from the foul pole), so if you're ever at a Twins game next year, come by and see if we’re there! We bought a 20-game package, so the odds are about one-in-four that we will be… Win Twins! Outdoors even!!!

Guess that's about it… I'll be back in a day or two, so have a great week everyone. Hope you have fun plans for the 4th of July and the weather cooperates, and I simply can’t believe it’s already the end of June...

Wilber, out!