First Farm American Race!

Read the story from Furniture Row Racing here.

On Saturday we first went to the Speedway Club at the track and toured the facility.  The views from that building are spectacular.  From there, we went to a private room where Pat Driscoll of Furniture Row Racing and Farm American explained the program and its objectives.  Joining us in that meeting were represenatives from Charlotte Motor Speedway and The Performance Racing Network (PRN). 

We then had the opportunity to meet Larry McReynolds.  Larry is one of the broadcasters that you see on FOX Sports.  He has a long history as a crew chief and later in his career transitioned to a broadcaster.  He spoke to us for about 30 minutes about NASCAR in general.

We ate lunch at the Speedway Club and traveled down to the track.  We were then given our radios.  The radios that we were given were the team radios for Furniture Row Racing.  They allowed us to talk amongst ourselves throughout the tour, hear the spotter, driver and team communicate before and during the race.  Charlie gave a great tour and covered all of the aspects of Racing, Qualifying, and team operations.  We followed cars through inspections, visited the tire and fueling stations, and watched car testing in the garages early in the afternoon.

Standing with Charlie is Tina White from Mike Rowe Works.

From there, we attended the driver meeting, watching all of the drivers come in, watch the video about the rules and explain the specifics about safety on the Texas Motor Speedway. 

After the driver meeting, we had the opportunity to go over the wall and wander up and down Pit Row.

We were then able to catch Regan Smith going over some final checks of the car.   

 Skip Fox helped us also with the tour, getting us into places that most people, even with HOT Passes would not be able to get.  Below is Doug standing next to the track close enough to touch the track, or the new Convertible Camaro’s that the drivers were riding in.

The grass out there is spectacular.  I will have to see if they have used Green Lawn lately. (They could have used some Micro 500 to deepen the green and yes, that is the white line)

We were close enough for Regan to recognize us and give us the thumbs up.

I did take some other pictures and thought about inserting pictures of some of your other favorite drivers but then realized that your new favorite driver is featured in the picture above.

Pit work is very athletic.  Here you see the guys getting ready for the race to start.

All of us had the opportunity to sit up in the pit box.  The view from there is spectacular and the cars go by twice as fast as they do on TV.  The gentleman on the right is Barney Visser of Furniture Row.

“Dude, that last pit wasn’t what we wanted, the next one needs to be better. Yes but your breath smells like pickles” – It is very loud, making communication difficult.

After about 100 laps, we moved up to the suite that Furniture Row Racing has.  The views were great and it was a good place to relax and eat a light meal after being out in the sun all day.

After the wreck, we went back down to the garage to see how things were going.  We decided to take off before the last lap to get ahead of the traffic.(next time you talk to Lang, ask him about the ride)  What a great experience.  Hopefully Farm American reaches full funding soon and we can look forward to more races this year.