Hi everyone, Toni here. Since everyone around here has been so busy, I decided to take a moment to check in and let you know what we have been up to lately. As Jim mentioned in his last blog, we tested at MIR (Maryland International Raceway) the day before we left for Indy and had a great day of testing. You know, sometimes you test and when you are finished you wonder if it was all worth it and other times you test and everything seems to fall right into place. Well, this time our test session was a huge success and I think the things we learned helped us with our performance at Indy. Of course, Bill Jenkins horsepower didn’t hurt either.

I know all of the guys at Jenkins Competition worked long hours and weekends trying to get everything ready for Indy and once again we were not disappointed. Bret and Ryan drove all night Thursday with engines and then worked all day Friday helping us to get qualified. It sure was nice to see all of their hard work pay off. I think I even saw Bill smile once or twice during the weekend too.

Anyway, we could not have been happier with our No. 2 qualifying effort at Indy this year. Believe it or not, we have not qualified at Indy for the past three years (nothing a few thousandths of a second would not have taken care of) and it was awesome to finally get that monkey off of our backs. As you have probably noticed from the qualifying sheets, this race is tough for everyone and though we had five qualifying sessions, it can still be a challenge to make the field. I know everyone on our team was looking forward to racing on Monday.

Well, we were one of the fastest cars first round and had lane choice going into second round and then, as luck would have it, w broke a rearend. You know, I can remember one other time that this happened to us --- Indy, 1996, first round. (Go figure!) Oh well, it was one of those freak things. The rearend was brand new for this race and Jamie had just serviced it on Sunday night. What are you going to do? I suppose we were lucky it didn’t happen on the Saturday night session or even first round.

Though we were extremely disappointed in not having a chance to continue the race, we were still very happy with our team and our performance during the weekend. Of course, the first thing we did when we returned to the pits was to take apart the rearend and transmission just to see what happened. As you can see by he pictures it didn’t take much to figure it out. During the middle of our “exploratory surgery” on the car, NHRA Tech came by and had us pull off a head so that they could check out the engine. What a mess we had in our pits. There was nothing in the car together. The car was apart, the engine was apart, the transmission was in pieces and Al (our crew guy) said the rearend housing was full of metal “potato chips.” I think that was his version of lots of metal shavings.

Once tech finished checking out the engine it didn’t take long to get everything put back together enough to get it loaded in the trailer. So another Indy went down into the record books.

Jim and I decided to leave the rig in Indy and fly back and forth to save some miles of driving. We figured it was a lot closer to drive to Memphis from Indy than it was to drive all the way home and then to Memphis. I figure it will save him about 20 hours of driving and being the person riding along with him in the rig -- I couldn’t agree with him more.

I think everyone around here is going to enjoy their weekend. Jamie and Cynthy are going to New Hampshire to visit her family and see their new nephew, Drew. Jon is going to enjoy football at Clemson. Of course that is after he puts in his hours of studying and homework. Right Jon? Melissa is working at the IHRA race in Toronto this weekend and though she is working, she always has a great time when she is at a racetrack. I’m not sure yet what Jim and I will be doing. I have been trying to talk him into visiting the boat for a couple of days, but don’t know if I can get him away from the shop long enough. We’ll just have to see.

Well, I need to get this sent to Rob Geiger so that he can get it posted. I hope everyone has a great weekend and we will post again soon.