As we sit here on the plane getting ready to head home from the Dover race a few of us reminisce on the activities of a once again long CoT race.  The 40, 41, and 42 teams all fly on the same plane to and from every race, so you hear some very interesting stories each week.  By the way we are 20^th in line to take off and it will be an hour or two before we get in the air.  That is icing on the cake for the day.  But it could be worse, I am not complaining at all because we are lucky to have the opportunity to do what we do. It is so frustrating when you don’t run well and it was a disappointing day.

Once again we had a rain delay and the race was run on Monday.  As we started the race I thought we were going to be in good shape.  Juan was hanging in there and was looking pretty good.  As the race went on the track kept getting tighter and tighter.  It was almost like we could not keep up with it with the changes in the pits.  On a pit stop Juan went to look at the tack to get his pit road speed and it was not working.  It did not have power and it turned out to be an alternator problem.  It was not charging the battery and just like a street car it will run awhile on just the battery power remaining but would eventually drain the battery, it would do it much faster because a race car uses much more power with all of the fans and cooling devices than a street car.  Juan transferred the power to the back-up battery but later we did have to do a lengthy pit stop to replace the batteries to be able to finish the race.   The car ran OK but not great, it was very tight and it is no secret that we need to improve the CoT cars and I am confident that they will be better soon.  But I have to focus on my job.  Although I do want to run good and win races, at the end of the day it is my goal to help get Juan through the race and finish with the car in one piece.  I let him know about trouble brewing and where wrecks are and any other situation that is out of the ordinary.  There is so much that can happen with 43 guys on the track going as fast as they can.  The saying that I have heard all of my life is “To finish first, you must first finish.”

We finished out the day with a 31^st-place finish.  To tell you the truth I was so busy all day because Dover is such a fast race track with constant action, I did not even know where we finished until after the race.  This week it is off to Pocono, Pennsylvania, another first time race track for Juan.  I am kind of looking forward to it, I think he will do well.  It is a big wide open race track and you can focus on going fast and the cars get spread out so you don’t have people all over you all of the time.  Have a good one, talk to you after Pocono!

-Tab