I was downloading photos from the Nikon D60 into iPhoto this morning, filling up a new album simply entitled "Sonoma" and ran across some great stuff I took at the pre-race driver-introduction deal. For years, it's always been my favorite place to take "people pictures" of many of the folks I've come to know in this sport, other than those on my own team (in our own pit area, doing our own stuff that always looks pretty much the same whether we're warming the car up in Phoenix, Englishtown, or Topeka) and up until this year I always had a good outlet for those shots. With the CSK team, our delworsham.com website's most popular feature was the Photo Gallery, and I'd fill it full of new pics after every race, focusing on "people shots" as opposed to the "same old" stuff.

Well, until we finally get timwilkerson.com redesigned and relaunched, we don't have that outlet, so I've naturally found myself taking fewer and fewer such photos, especially "backstage" at driver intros, because I don't have a good place to share them, other than here. The problem is, right after races the blogs tend to be about what we did there, so even this place isn't always the right outlet for photos that are totally unrelated to anything other than what I wanted to shoot at the moment. Well today, I've decided, it is the right outlet.

I had a renewed urge to shoot quite a bit in the backstage area in Sonoma, of lots of friendly faces, and since I've had the chance to document our race day and the associated fun of winning already, I'll use today's installment just to ramble on about some random stuff, and then include all of the pics in one gallery below. There aren't necessarily stories that go with each one; I just picked the ones I liked the best and threw them all in there. Consider it your chance to go behind the scenes, where you get to hang out with the drivers, photographers, PR people, and NHRA staffers who are always milling around behind the curtain...

And by the way, the people with the toughest job back there are the NHRA event managers, who have to get the drivers lined up in order (16th at the front of the line, 1st at the end) in some sort of organized fashion and on time. You can't imagine how often you hear them screaming "Force! Where's Force? Over here, I need you right behind Beckman. Force!!!" You can also insert a wide variety of other names, in both slots...

Another behind the scenes thing I've already been discussing through other channels was the cover of the new National DRAGSTER. It's the issue with the Seattle results, and a certain Levi, Ray & Shoup car is on the cover. Ta Daaa!!!! To be clear, just because we won that race doesn't make such a cover appearance an automatic thing, and throughout the years I've been both thrilled and disappointed in the various outcomes of that exact editorial decision. At races where the bikes run, there are four pro drivers who have taken home the Wally, and each one of those stories can be intriguing, newsworthy, or otherwise special, but rarely do the powers-that-be at the ND include more than one car or bike on the cover, so 75 percent of the winners are going to be sad to see they were not the ones chosen to represent that particular race. This time, we were the 25 percent who were happy...

That's not to say there isn't plenty of behind-the-scenes lobbying going on as soon as the event is over, of course. This time, because it was pretty obvious that Antron Brown was already the key story due to his back-to-back wins in Denver and Seattle to open the Western Swing, my initial assumption was that the cover would go his way, but perhaps the theory on the editorial end was to wait to see if he swept it, since that would pretty much demand an Antron appearance on the front of your DRAGSTER. Therefore, perhaps by default but aided by the fact it was Tim's first win of the year and it came at a critical moment, a wonderful shot of the LRS Shelby Mustang is the featured photo, and all of us are thrilled. In addition, Antron can now be on the cover with his broom (I'm assuming, since I haven't seen the next cover and don't know which photo they chose) without being there two weeks in a row. Worked out just like they planned it, eh...

All of that means we're happy and I really didn't press or persuade a certain editor we all know and love, but I will admit to being a fairly incessant pest a few times over the last decade or so. There was Del's win in Chicago, on the weekend we blew up the Mountain Dew car and then won the race with a patched-together hybrid CSK/Dew body. I really wanted that one, and even helped Mr. Editor with the headline "Del Dew Run Run." And there was the time when we won the CSK Nationals in '02, of course, and the headline ended up being "Not In Our House!" because we beat John Force, who was going for his 100th race win. By the time I got my message to my trusted mentor after that one, he'd already decided to give us the cover but I recall we collaborated on the headline... At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Switching gears, here's another timely topic that is probably one of those things the majority of people don't know about. When you win, of course, you get those precious Full Throttle hats to wear in the Winner's Circle photos and then take home. This year's hats have "Funny Car Winner" stitched on the side, which is a sort of thing that makes them even more precious and collectible. When we were winning POWERade hats, the first year they were just generic black hats, but then they started getting more creative with them and making sure the embroidery on each hat made it clear what it represented. Even the old Winston hats, from back in the day (which we simply called "the red hats" because they were always red and, at the end of the day, everyone wanted to wear a red hat) varied over the years, but mostly they had specific stitching on them.

The thing was, the amount of hats you got was always a very closely guarded and controlled quantity, and frankly it was almost never enough. Once you get to the Winner's Circle, you take everyone on the team, including people who may not even be in uniform but are key members of the group. Back in the 90s, we'd get up there and would be handed one box of hats by either an NHRA, Winston, or POWERade person, and it was usually my job to figure out who was going to miss the cut in terms of getting one. That was never any fun, and there was never a good answer or a decent way to break the news to the people who missed out.

Now, I'm pleased to say, the process is much easier and self-regulated. There are two full boxes marked FC (with a Sharpie) sitting on the ground in the Winner's Circle, and they actually trust us to go grab the correct boxes and hand out our precious lids, all by our little selves. Even with every pertinent person in the Winner's Circle, we had enough hats to make sure John Fink could take a few with him for guys like Rick Strang, Jerry Muzzillo, and Eric & Brad Buttermore, who have all helped us a ton this year but didn't make the long trip to the west coast. It's such a relief to not have to worry about rationing the hats and so much better to not have to see the pouty lower lips of the people who didn't get them!

Here at the homestead, I had to run back over to Minneapolis today, to pick up my suitcase at the repair place. I'm happy to report it now, once again, has four (count 'em, four) functioning and rotating wheels, all of which spin around 360 degrees so that you can "walk your suitcase" with it next to you, rather than just simply tug it along behind...

Since I was over there, I swung by Target Field again, just to get up-close and feel a little bit more of the excitement that's building for the new ballpark. From the road I was on, I could actually look in from the left field corner and see the section where we'll be sitting next year, and I could even see our seats! I'd noticed on the Target Field webcam, just the other day, that they've now officially bolted the seats in place in Section 103, and it's easy to count down four rows from the top and spot seats 1 and 2. Kinda cool, actually...

In just the last week, I've also had about a dozen people ask me to post some new pics of Da Boyce on the blog, but they're both a little under the weather right now, with little "kitty colds". If you've been reading the blog since we adopted them, you might remember they came home from the shelter really sick with colds, and our wonderful veterinarian has explained to us that when kittens get those germs in the shelter environment, it's a lot like a human getting a herpes virus. It can go dormant for a long time, then "flare up" when something stressful or anxious happens. Well, I think for Boofus and Buster it's just been a stressful summer, with lots of activity in the house, people coming and going, and lots of wildlife flying around out there on the porch, and they each seemed to get a little sneezy a few days ago. So now I'm administering the kitty equivalent of a Z-Pack to them, via a liquid I have to squirt in their mouths. They don't like it, but they don't seem to hold it against me. Plus, the Big Fella has a weepy eye he gets, whenever he gets stressed, so I have stuff I'm supposed to apply to his eye twice a day, and that's a bit of a challenge to do by yourself. They'll be better quickly, though, so as soon as they are I'll post some new pics. Right now, they've requested that no photos be taken in their sad-sack state. Poor little guys...

Well, I guess that's about it for today. Barb and I are going to dinner in downtown St. Paul tonight, because she has an evening flight down to Milwaukee for some meetings there tomorrow. Enjoy the "people pics" in the gallery...

Wilber, out!