Hello everyone, Troy Fasching here, assistant crew chief on Hillary Will's, Ken Black Racing Top Fuel dragster. I told Hillary that I would write a blog for her, so here goes.



People often ask us what it is like being a member of a race car team, so I will give you some insight about our last two months. We returned to work on the third of January from our Christmas break, had that first weekend off in January, and we worked all day, every day from then until Feb. 13. In other words, we worked 37 days straight without a day off. Generally our work days last much longer than eight or nine hours. We get to the track about 8 a.m. We work all day. We’re lucky to leave the track before 7 or 8 p.m. We usually grab some fast food for dinner, go back to our hotel rooms, and go to sleep before we do it all over again. We don’t complain about these things because this is what we love doing and what we get paid to do, but if you are only doing this job for the paycheck, you would often ask yourself if it is worth it. Being away from home for that long can often take a toll on your personal life, and most of us on Hillary's team are married and have kids, it makes it even harder. Like I said, you really have to love doing this.



When we left the shop Jan.18, we headed to Vegas for the first test session. We made nine runs there in three days, drove down to Phoenix where we made 11 runs in four days. Then we loaded up and went back to Vegas and made nine more runs there before finally heading to Pomona for the Winternationals. We figure that each run takes at least three hours worth of work for each person on that day.

As most of you know, we also crashed a car at the second Vegas test session so that added to the workload for all of us. We put our spare car together on Super Bowl Sunday and made some test runs the two following days, so needless to say we listened to the game on our satellite radio.

We raced at Pomona, serviced our parts on the Monday after, and we all finally got some much needed time off the week between Pomona and Phoenix. We all came back to race in Phoenix, made six more test runs on Monday and Tuesday and finally loaded up and made the two-day trek back to our Michigan shop. We will spend the next week and a half servicing our parts from our three test sessions and two races as well as putting together our new Attac dragster that was just built to replace the one we crashed. We will leave the shop on Wednesday for the Gatornationals, so we have been and will stay very busy.

So, to make a long story short, when people come up to us and tell how glamorous of a lifestyle working on a Top Fuel race team must be, we find ourselves biting out tongues because we all know how much work we do. This is a lifestyle for us more than a job and for most of us it is the only thing we know, good or bad. Like I said before, we do this for the love of the sport.

See ya.