July 27 Blog

This past week we drove our El Monte RV down from Seattle to Sonoma for our next event. My crew chief Dean (Guido) and his wife Kelly drove down with Dan and me and we had a great time. It was a beautiful drive along the coast and we stopped in Eureka, CA for the night. The next morning we continued our journey through the Redwood Forrest which is near where my father grew up. We stopped and took pictures next to the huge redwood trees and I picked up a small log truck for my dad at a gift shop.  From there we continued down towards Sonoma and met up with Mark Pardini from BrandSource and his wife Adriane and they took us on a tour of the Fetzer Wines bottling facility and wine cave. Across town we went to another wine cave and got to meet John Fetzer who owns his own winery and explained to us about the very interesting and intense world of wine making!

That afternoon we got to Infineon Raceway and got set up and spent the next day dropping off laundry, getting groceries and getting the race lounge and the RV cleaned up. We went in to San Francisco Thursday night for the Eric Medlen Nitro Night Dinner which raises money for the Speedway Children’s Charities and had a lot of fun.

On Friday it was back to business and qualifying. We made some great runs in our Ronald McDonald House Charities Castrol Mustang but unfortunately went out early Sunday in the first round against Ron Capps when our car got into trouble and lost traction. It’s been our worst finish in awhile but we leave there #3 and also clenched our spot in the Countdown and hope to get back to going rounds in a few weeks when we race in Brainerd.

Since Sonoma is not too far from home I got to see a lot of friends this weekend including Ken and Cheryl Meadows, Stephen Densham, and Hillary Will. Our close friends and neighbors Josh and Jen cam up since Josh needed to film all of our race cars and teams, and they brought their new baby boy Quinlan up too for his first national event so we had a good time even though we didn’t end up in the winner’s circle!