4-20-09

Monday April 20 Weekly Blog

We were really excited this weekend to return to Atlanta, since it’s where we won our first funny car national event last year. Every driver has certain tracks they tend to do really well at and others that they struggle at. For some reason, my team’s done well every time that we’ve come to Atlanta. I’m not sure why that is since the weather, air, temperature and track can change on an hourly basis, but my crew chiefs seem to have this track figured out pretty well and I’ve been able to drive well also so that combination may be why we’ve had success here in Atlanta.

This year I got into Atlanta on Wednesday and attended the NHRA Full Throttle press conference. Afterwards my husband Dan and I drove up to Commerce for the event. Some race weekends we get in the night before the races and others we get in a couple days early and Atlanta was one of them. It’s nice to be able to get in to town and get organized at the track and have an early dinner and get to bed early so come Friday we are ready to go. Thursday afternoon after some time at the track we grabbed dinner at a local Mexican restaurant with my crew chiefs Ron and Guido (Dean) and his wife Kelly, who does our PR along with our other PR person Elon. It was great to catch up with everyone and see how each person’s Easter went, chat about our success here last year and the race track conditions and outlook for this upcoming weekend.

Friday morning all the craziness started early and went straight through until race day. There were radio call ins, newspaper interviews, ESPN2 filming, qualifying sessions and many great fans at the ropes through out the weekend. On our first qualifying session I was in my race car 2 pairs behind dad and heard him tell his team over the radio “Let’s put a 4.10 on the board.” Then they started their car and ran a 4.10! So I got on the radio and said “Is it that easy? Do we just say what we want to run and then run it? Alright Guido, I want to run a…4.07!” I was sarcastic and joking of course but then I made a great pass and my crew chief Ron got on the radio as I was coasting off the track and said “What did you ask for again, a 4.07? Well, you got it!” I couldn’t believe it! We were ecstatic and so excited about getting the #1 spot. We made 3 great qualifying runs total and one tire smoke through the course of the qualifying days so we were really confident and excited about race day.

Sunday morning we raced Del Worsham in the first round and had a great side by side race and fortunately won the round. After some rain delays we raced our teammate Mike Neff in the 2nd round. We were able to beat him and then Tony Pedregon in the 3rd round. Because we qualified number one and ran good all day we were able to get lane choice each round and that played a big role in our success since the right lane was better than the left. After more rain delays it was finally time to go up for the final round at around 8pm that evening. We ran Jack Beckman who we ironically beat 2 races prior in the final round for our win in Houston. Unfortunately it was not our day to win. We lost to Jack and his team in the final round when I lost vision down track and had to lift early. As fun as it is to race at night it is also a challenge since we don’t do it all that often. We had a great running car all day however so we are excited about that and will look forward  to our next race in St. Louis and hope we continue to do as well as we have been. And we’ll cross our fingers for no more rain!