Stop me if this sounds familiar... It rained again at the races. I don't know what it is, but these cities and states that brag about their fantastic weather are taking a big hit these days.
Our visit to the sunshine state began Thursday in Jacksonville at the UPS hub facility. We were invited to attend the facility, have the car on display and for me to address the drivers before they began their day. The facility is huge, over 3,000 employees on site and trucks as far as the eye can see. We had a great time and a great deal of employees got to look at our top fuel dragster up close and personal, buy some merchandise and generally share their support for our team. I want to say thanks and a tip of the cap to QJ Arnold at UPS for arranging the visit.
After the display we headed an hour down the road to Gainesville to begin our preparation for the Gatornationals.
Here is where the story starts to sound familiar: a beautiful day on Thursday and rain all day on Friday. Not just any rain but a cold rain. I don't believe the temperature ever hit 50 degrees and a miserable day lead to a washout on Friday. No professionals hit the track on Friday, putting the pressure back on everyone as we would go into Saturday with two qualifying attempts to make the show.
The big difference from the Phoenix race was in Phoenix we made a good run right off the bat and were safely in the field. That allowed us to step on it for the second session. The problem in Gainesville was we missed it on the first run badly and smoked the tires. This created two problems: one we weren't qualified, and two we would be running in the front of the session for session number two because of our poor effort.
I have seen this scenario play out more times than I can remember, a team sets their car up soft so they can go down the track and qualify and are able to do it. Then, because of their early running in the session, they end up setting it up too soft as the cars behind them go quicker and bump them out. So you are faced with a dilemma, just how soft do you want to go up there? Do you try and go quicker to make sure that doesn't happen?
Well we tried to go a bit quicker than the track would allow and smoked the tires, ending our weekend. I can't even to begin tell you how disappointed I and the entire team were. We messed up badly on the set up and decided to stay on Monday and test to try and create a bigger window for our car so we would be more successful going down marginal racetracks. I think we made some big strides on Monday as far as the setup goes and think we created a bigger platform for our team to be successful at future races. We now head to Houston with high hopes of getting our season back on track and returning to the form we showed at the end of last season.
Watch us this weekend and we will see together if we are headed down the right track!
Thanks for reading,