Racing in your hometown is always a challenge. There are many great things about it: your friends, family and everyone you may have ever met gets to come to the races, the downside is that everyone you have ever met gets to come to the races!
It is quite an undertaking to make sure everyone has tickets, parking passes, and enjoys themselves. In addition to those responsibilities you also have remember one thing: you are there to race.
My week started off with the usual media responsibilities that come from racing in your hometown - do some radio interviews, a couple of television spots about the upcoming race, an appearance at the ESPN zone here in Atlanta and then the pre race press conference, which is always nice because we are served lunch from Ruth's Chris Steak House. Hard to beat that.
Qualifying started off with a tire-smoking run. Track conditions were a bit iffy for the first session and while we tried to just make a conservative run we smoked the tires anyway. The second qualifying session brought a little better result. We were conservative in our set up and were rewarded with a safe run of 4.72, which put us in the 10th spot after the first day of qualifying.
On Saturday we continued to struggle. We just do not have a handle on our race car and didn't improve. We actually dropped to the 13th position. We would face Larry Dixon in round one on Sunday.
On Sunday we awoke to vastly different conditions than the ones we had in qualifying: overcast skies, rain clouds and an extremely tight track because of the weather change. We just didn't have enough for the track first round, fortunately my opponent was in the same boat. We both shook the tires and I was fortunate to recover quicker and took the win light, setting up a battle between the UPS dragster and my buddy JR Todd.
When your team is struggling every member has to do a little extra to try and help where they can. Second round the driver helped out with a great reaction time and we were able to beat JR with a slower elapsed time. Winning on a holeshot is very sweet for a driver. You hate to do it to one of your buddies but on raceday friendships stay on the sidelines.
We would face and lose to Antron Brown in the semi finals. Antron is doing a great job and as bad as our car is performing right now theirs is the opposite. We tried to step up the performance for Antron and while we did, we were actually dead even at half track, our car stumbled again in the back half of the race track and Antron pulled ahead for the victory.
While we are still disappointed in our performance, we were very fortunate to steal a couple of round wins in Atlanta and those could be the key to helping us get into the countdown later in the year. I know our car is capable of winning races once we get back on track. Our team is working very hard to put us back into that position and I expect we will have a handle on the car shortly and start making a charge. Once again thanks for all the support our team receives, it means a lot, especially when you are struggling.
To be able to hear all the well wishes and encouragement from all of the UPS employees goes a long way in helping to keep everyone's chin up and to serve as a reminder to keep digging.
On to St. Louis.
Thanks for reading,