Tuesday, 9 a.m.: Arrive at shop to see what Brian Butler has sent I swear it's the biggest headrest I have ever seen the entire shop is asking me what it is. When I show it to the crew chief he says what every crew chief says: "Man I bet that thing weighs 15 pounds! Are you sure you need that?" All crew chiefs are freaks when it come to weight. They spend all winter making cars as light as they can and a driver comes in and adds a 15-pound air conditioner and now wants to put in this huge headrest. But he tells me if that is what I think I need then it's OK (with a laugh) I have to wait until Jason and Stew (Car Chief) get done setting up the Atlanta car before I can put in my new headrest. They get done about 3:30 p.m. and tell me that I have until 11 a.m. tomorrow to finish up because they want to get the car on the chassis dyno before it leaves for Atlanta. So, I start my project of installing this giant headrest. Brian told me that it should take about two to three hours to install yeah right!
I figured it would take a while to put it in, but what I wasn't expecting was having to redo all of the other seat mounting brackets in the car. I finally gave up at 9:30 that night. I was too tired to go out and do anything after that, so Jay (shock guy) and I went to get some Chinese food and call it a day.
Wednesday, 6 a.m.:
Up and heading to the shop. Jason told me I had until 11 a.m. to finish up the headrest, I have already spent six hours on this project and I had a lot left to do so I wanted to make sure I was done in time. I did finish in time and I even went to get a haircut at 10:00 a.m. But, I had made such a mess in the car with rollbar padding and leg braces that by the time we were all finished it was too late to chassis dyno. I didn't get in trouble though, everyone knows that safety comes before horsepower (everyone, that is, except the crew chief). By 2:30, the truck was loaded up and on its way to Atlanta. The team (Jason, Stew, Mike and Big Daddy ) all drove down in the team van while Jay and I took my Tahoe. Jay decided that this was a good time to sleep but I didn't mind because it gave me an opportunity to listen to my new CDs. We arrived in Morrow, Georgia at 10:00 local time, we checked into our hotel and went to the Chinese Chef for dinner.
Thursday: Today is tech day at the track and it doesn't start until noon so everyone got to sleep in. We really didn't do much today since tech day is usually pretty laid back. A lot of the drivers don't go, but I like to so I can talk to the Busch officials and get to know them better.
Friday: Up at 5.30 a.m. Today is qualifying day. I have never been to Atlanta and we brought a car that I have never been in so we are going to have a tough day. Everyone told me how fast Atlanta is so I was a little intimidated before I even got on the racetrack and, to make things worse, when I got in the car to go out for practice I reached up to adjust my mirror and it broke. Jason looked at me and said "Man, that's seven years bad luck." After the last two weeks we didn't need any more bad luck. We didn't start out very good, I think we were 37th fastest on the timing board, but I was not worried because the car wasn't handling right and I knew that when we got it right we would be OK. We ended up 15th after practice which I was happy with considering we didn't test here. We made some changes before qualifying and thought we would end up in the Top 10, but instead we ended up 13th. So now we have a broken mirror and we qualified 13th. Happy Hour once again was not happy at all. We tried everything and I was very unhappy with the car when we were done. We all went back to the room that night and talked about what we could do. We decided on changing the RF (right front) upper a frame, RF spring, RR (right rear) spring, sway bar, track bar, shocks, LF (left front) spring and to try some things on air pressure. I met up with my teammate Kevin Grubb and Casey Atwood later that night to go out to dinner. We all were wanting to go out and eat a nice filet but everyplace was so busy we ended up at McDonalds.
p>Saturday: Up at 6 a.m. Arrive at track at 9 a.m. I was suppose to do a sponsor appearance at 9:30 but it got changed until after the driver's meeting, which was bad for me because MRO has a chapel service after the driver's meeting each week that I go to. So after the driver's meeting I headed up to Condo #619 for my sponsor Williams TravelCenters. I really don't mind going and doing things for Williams. I have become friends with a lot of the people from there and it's nice to get away from Jason asking me 500 question in the pits.
11:30. Going back down to the pits to get ready for the start of the race. Jason and I had a meeting before the race and he told me that our main goal was to finish and to stay out of trouble. We also went over our plan for pit stops. We had made so many changes that I didn't know how the car was going to feel, and today's weather was nothing like what we had in Happy Hour. I could tell after one lap that the changes we made to the car were all in the right direction. We moved up from 13th to 8th in about two laps and stayed in the top 11 until lap 89 when the caution came out for a wreck on the backstretch. We came in the pits 11th and came out 7th. The guys had an awesome pit stop and we felt like our luck had changed. There were only 11 cars on the lead lap so all we had to do was just finish the race and at worst we would still come home 11th. That is until one lap after the race went back green and we had a RF tire go flat. I was saying every cuss word that you can think of. We came in, put new tires on the car and lost two laps. We went from 7th to 37th in about one minute because of one tire. The rest of the day went about the same. We had another RF tire go flat with about 30 laps to go. We are hoping that all of our bad luck is out of our way now. After the team got the truck loaded up Jay and I jumped in my Tahoe and headed back to Central City. We got home at about 9:30 and headed straight to the Eagles for a couple of beers. We felt like after a day like that a few beers were well deserved.
Sunday: Up at 10 a.m. for a relaxing game of golf with Jay, Stew and Casey Atwood. And if you are wondering, I spanked everyone of them. After that home to rest, watch some TV and get ready for next week. Next, we are heading for Darlington. We tested there about a month ago and were very fast so I cant wait to get there and hopefully have a change in luck.