Claffie's Stuff

We're in the final stages of cleaning up the hotel room before heading out of the Springhill Suites. I think as far as Showdowns go, this one was one of the better ones, at least it didn't fall into total and complete bedlam in the closing stages as has been the case in years past. It's pretty bummy that Sean got dumped out of the lead fairly early on, and to add insult to injury, NASCAR took his engine after the race.

We'll have a pretty quiet afternoon out here in L.A. for the last day. We'll go find a beach and try to play Tourist Guy one more time, then it's off to find some dinner and eventually head back to the podunk airport for our overnight flight back to Washington.

Hopefully we didn't come up too short in coverage - we tend to get caught out during these hurry-up-and-wait race weekends where there's nothing going on for most of the day and then Everything Happens NOW. But we've still got a couple days' worth of photos to put up, maybe even some articles to write, some sort of recap for Busch East Scene no doubt, and then settle in for a nice long winter figuring out how to pay for this trip and justify doing it all over again next year.

Time to pack up, head home, and go see some puppies who'll probably be pretty happy to see their mommas and daddy again.

As we speak here, the drivers meeting is going on. The activity this afternoon can best be described as non-existent. The six cars that transferred to the feature went through inspection, and the two cars that needed repairs following time trials were finished up and passed tech as well.

The forty cars that will race tonight are lined up on the track and the group photo was taken with just a little consternation.

The alleged 3 p.m. press conference where we expected to be introduced to the new series sponsor was scrubbed, though there's no reason to believe that it was because of any undoing of any deal.

I think everyone's here and accounted for, Cliff (not me) is here at my side taking in the soothing sounds of Dave Baker and it's going to be a great night for baseball.

We might check in again here or on the main site before getting the green flag, but it's possible that the next update will be the posting of a quick & dirty finish.

We're about to enjoy what should be a delicious breakfast at Spires after a fairly long day at the track yesterday and a quick morning posting some pics.

I think we, and by "we" I mean "other people", did all right yesterday as fifteen out of sixteen East drivers made the show. Scott Bouley is the odd man out after pushing too hard and thumped the wall in the consi. After the race he was still in good spirits; he vows to continue in the series. We'll have more on that later.

Breakfast just arrived so we'll shut this off and have a bite to eat.

If you're looking for racing content, wait till tomorrow.

Thursday has historically been our free day in California since the Showdown was shrunk down to a two-day show. Usually we'd get into town on Wednesday in time to catch the champions' press conference and then spend the balance of the day getting groceries for the remainder of our stay and just generally resetting our personal clocks to the time difference. This has been more of the latter and much less of the former as of late with the press conference going from a Very Big Deal the first year or two to nonexistent more recently. Luckily we don't need to do these press conferences anymore as NASCAR sends out far more advance material than we could ever use in the weeks and months leading up to the event in question.

Tee hee.

On a related note, we see that a couple of our drivers and a couple more than a couple of West drivers spent at least part of today at Pendleton's Marine base to meet troops and show off their cars and stuff. We don't know if this was something that maybe the increasingly shrinking Mini-Media could have covered, seeing as how it was in town and everything and I think even drove by the base in question during the course of the day, but maybe it was invite-only and our invite got lost in the mail. It's not like this might be something to a) sell the event or b) sell the series with a little good publicity.

Or maybe it was something that was only on a need-to-know basis, and we didn't need to know. The conspiracy theorists among us acknowledge how NASCAR may or may not be trying to discourage the hobbyist media from covering a series that is now suddenly a Big Deal.

But I digress.

After exhausting all possibilities of things that are either free or cheap to see or do in the greater Los Angeles area over the past four years, we had to spread our wings a bit this time. That's not totally true, but looking at the options for a cost-conscious tourist, nothing seemed that appealing and seeing that San Diego was just a couple hours down the road, that sounded like a pretty good idea. We went there in January 2006 and it's a nice little city; a return trip certainly was do-able especially with our being so close and with a day to ourselves.

We didn't venture into the guts of the city; the main goal was to go to the cove in La Jolla and soak in the sun and visit the seals. It couldn't have been a better day to be at the beach; cool enough to make one consider a light jacket but warm enough to make leaving it in the car a wise decision. There was nary a cloud in the sky, the water was a brilliant teal, and the waves were crashing upon the rocks.

Which leads us to the title of this post. I went with the intention of only being Tourist Guy. When I go to fun places like this I have a tendency to be Photographer Guy - you know, the yahoo who has to haul around his bazillion-dollar gear, tripod included, shooting frame after frame looking for the absolute most perfect shot to bring home. Think he has any fun? Maybe.

Tourist Guy doesn't worry about that stuff. He just wants to show where he's been and that's it. Artistic merit? Only if it happens through dumb luck.

So I left the big guns at the hotel and left with just one camera (well, two, cause even Tourist Guy should bring a back-up): a $200 Fuji point-and-shoot, one step up from Fisher-Price. It's hardly serious equipment, and nobody's going to look at that and say "whoa better make sure we don't get in his shot".

Armed with no extra lenses, no tripod - not even a second set of batteries! - Tourist Guy set out to enjoy the beach and, sadly, turned into Photographer Guy. It has nothing to do with the hardware, I found out, especially in a point-and-shoot where it's still pretty easy to slip into full manual mode and start mucking around with shutter and aperture working in concert with each other or, as what usually happens to me, against each other.

My dark nemesis at the beach, La Jolla's in particular, is capturing the spray that erupts when waves crash against rocks, the sea wall, or other waves. To stop the water in mid-spray, in bright sunlight, the shutter gets cranked up to 1/1000 of a second. If the result is too dark, fiddle with the aperture. Since aperture choices in a point-and-shoot aren't exactly (relatively) limitless as in, say, the D100 used trackside, we might not find a happy medium so we compromise with the aperture and start fiddling with the shutter speed again. Wait for spray, shoot, check shot, groan loudly, fiddle with settings, repeat. Times, like, twenty. Then walk down the sidewalk fifty yards and do the same thing while the wife says "I thought you weren't gonna be Photographer Guy".

And she, whose shiny new EastSeries.com business cards show her job title as "Photographer", didn't even bring a camera.

The highlight of La Jolla Cove is the heavily fortified beach where the seals chill. She says she could hang around there and watch them for a whole day. Don't think I'm capable of that myself but we do have to admit that they're entertaining creatures. Allegedly graceful in water, they're comical on land but they're endearing as they struggle to get in and out of the water. They lounge on the sand in packs but apparently some have personal space issues as we saw a few get slap-happy when others wandered a little too closely... maybe blocking their sun while working on a tan? They're ugly little cigar-shaped creatures, but endearing. We understand the appeal, we have Pugs.

Tell Rogelio's crew that they can sleep easy, we have Twizzlers. We also have the speedway-mandated orange vests, increasing our trip's outlay by another $20 and a visit to Home Depot. They're quite the fashion statement, and I think once the race is done and victory lane is over with, the photographers will probably be corralled by track management and sent out into the parking lot to work traffic control.

Tomorrow we get serious with the start of on-track activity for the big metal cars. We did swing by the track this evening to see a little Late Model practice and one was getting scraped off the turn two wall as we arrived. Didn't catch a number, not that that's important because we don't know who any of these guys are in the first place. I figure when their feature time comes tomorrow night, I'm going to go back to when I was ten years old and dear old dad brought me to Riverside Park Speedway for the first time, and I'll root for the car with the coolest paint job.

We plan on getting to the track before the 9AM rookie meeting. Give us an hour or so to recon who's there and their pertinent information and we'll produce an entry list, then keep tuning in throughout the day as we post practice times and news tidbits followed by qualifying results and last-chance race results all the way through to, with any luck, a Showdown 250-lapper complete and (shockingly) correct starting lineup.

Time for bed.

It can't possibly be only 6:00 p.m. and change locally. I'm ready for bed.

We landed in Long Beach in good shape and got the rental car (Pontiac Grand Prix) without hassles. There's not much to report from the track, I think there were all of five Grand National division teams waiting to be parked, plus one Late Model team. It doesn't sound like much right now, but nobody really has to be there till tomorrow afternoon which is when they'll fling open the pit gates and try to figure out where to park a hundred or so haulers.

Those who were there before us included the operations of Kobyluck, Schrader/Hayes, Santerre/Caisse, and the West's Daryl Harr. Showing up at about the same time that we did was Peyton Sellers' duallie and single-car trailer. None of the drivers were around.

We got our credential confirmation in the afternoon's email with the little snippet saying that photographers had to provide their own orange vests to wear at all times. I want to like the track but this is kinda bogus, making photogs spring for their own safety gear - imagine if every track mandated such a thing, but one track wanted photogs dressed in orange while another wants them in white and a third says neon green, please. That could be an expensive proposition. And springing it on us after we've already packed up and left town leaves us in a bit of a bind. We were all over town looking for a regular photo vest and coming up empty, now we have to find something in orange in an area where even if we did know where these things were sold, could we find one within a reasonable drive without getting lost (something that I believe is a requirement for outsiders driving in and around L.A.)?

I'm sure we'll figure something out and it'll be fine. I'm just not a big fan of surprises, especially surprises that make us have to buy stuff we might only need once a year, if that.

NASCAR graced us with a new entry list showing 54 cars. It's available in a couple of versions, both of which require far too much reformatting and tidying up for our little site  so I'll just send you to a link where someone else just clunkily cut and pasted it. I don't think there were any significant additions or subtractions regarding those coming from the east. Besides, we're just going to have to generate the entry list all over again once we get our feet on the pit area ground on Friday morning. Considering how (un)reliable NASCAR entry lists have proven to be when issued before an event actually starts, we'll gladly save the extra work and make it up to the readers when we can put actual eyeballs to actual race cars.

The battle plan for tomorrow is to go on vacation with a little drive down to San Diego to hang out on the beaches of La Jolla and make friends with some friendly seals. We'll be on the lookout for orange vests and Twizzlers for Skaff's Skrew ("Skaff's Screw" just didn't look right when I first punched it in, though it makes more sense to me). It's back to business on Friday with plenty of on-track activity to cover for our loyal visitor

This worked so well for that little drive to Minnesota and back, we'll do it again. Only this time, we're not driving.

It's almost 8PM Tuesday night and the airplane takes off in about twelve hours. What will happen between now and then? For starters, Kate should be here. She's been in New Orleans for the better part of a week for work; after a five-day stretch away from home, you know the first thing anyone wants to do is unpack, repack, and get back on a plane for another far-flung journey. But she's up to it and I'm trying to make her job easier by having all the stuff I have to bring pretty much ready to go.

I am not allowed to do the actual packing because if it were up to me, I'd bring maybe two pairs of pants, three shirts, and maybe enough socks and undies to get through half the weekend. With her heading up the process, we're pretty much assured that I'll be bringing not only enough stuff to get me through till we come home Sunday night, but probably seventy pounds of clothes I won't need at any point.

Clothes are one thing, I'm concentrating more on making sure we will have the needed hardware. We've made an effort to travel light, but that's impossible when we're trying to cover all the bases. There's fifty pounds of camera equipment, two laptops, and the stuff needed to watch the race from the pressbox - scanner, headphones, binoculars, etc.

How we're going to crunch all this stuff down to enough luggage that two people can handle, I don't know. But that's her problem.

Me, I'm going to settle in, watch a baseball game and think about sleep since that 4AM alarm is going to be, literally, a rude awakening.

We'll check back on Wednesday.

Pulled into the driveway at 11:45 PM Monday night. Our little 2,673.5-mile, two-track, two-race ordeal is pretty much over. There's a bunch of work to be done but having just been reunited with the puppies and having spent the last 16 hours motoring, I hope my leaving that till tomorrow can be forgiven.

We'll probably be back to go over everything in more detail but the whole driving part of the weekend actually went really well. Didn't hit any living creatures, didn't fall off the road snoozing, didn't run afoul of any tractor-trailers, and didn't even hit any real backups till I found construction on I-270 in Frederick MD which was about the one-hour-till-home point, and even got through that pretty smoothly. The car performed admirably, comfortably, relatively economically (still kinda bummed that I could only get ~28 MPG for the whole trip when I was expecting 32ish), and most importantly, reliably. Some might scoff at the thought of driving Hyundais but that 06 Sonata V6 ate up mile after mile smoothly and quietly, can't ask for much more than that.

Hopefully we didn't do too badly on the radio show, and it'll be pretty cool to be a monthly correspondent to keep its listeners up to speed on what's happening in our series.

Kate called after my spot on the show was over and said she had the streaming show going on her computer at the house and while I was on the poor pugs were going berserk barking and looking for their daddy. They could hear him but they couldn't find him anywhere. Now they're draped all over me snoozing and it's making me pretty sleepy as well.

That's enough fun for one night.

Just made what better be the last gas stop of the trip at the same station I made the first stop five days ago. Gas only went up eight cents a gallon to a relative bargain $3.079 so everyone should head down to Cambridge, Ohio to top off their tanks before it catches up to the rest of the world.

Saw a lot of haulers going the other way, mostly motorcycle racers as well as some NHRA and/or IHRA stuff. Also saw a dually pulling a black enclosed trailer lettered "Santos Motorsports" with a sponsor whose logo was a big "K" - don't know if that's the same Santos as the Massachusettsian Bobby/Erica gang.

Time to hit the road again, this time the sunset will be behind me. We'll make a stop along the way to talk to Gary Danko on his radio show (www.watr.com), he said it'll happen in the 7:00 hour. After that, it's the final leg and for me that can't come soon enough.

Well we missed our Indianapolis goal by about a ton, bedding down well short of Peoria for that matter. But the early shutdown got me out of deer-watching (thankfully not needing deer-dodging) and we're getting a relatively early start to heading home in daylight hours. I don't think a Waldorf arrival at a decent hour tonight is possible but we should be back in good shape to get all the work that has to be done post-Iowa done and still be in decent shape for the return to the day (night) job Tuesday night.

Once we had results and points posted, we got the heck out of Iowa Speedway around 7:30? 8:30? local time (can't remember, besides I never bothered changing my watch or the car's clock to reflect the different time zone) and we're heading home.

We're about 25 miles on the wrong side of Davenport IA with the goal of making Indianapolis before neding to snooze. Might make it, might not. But it's roughly 10 hours to Waldorf from Indy so at that point I'll have a lot better idea of when I should be getting home to my puppies.

I haven't seen any NASCAR missives about changes to any finish so everything we put up before leaving the track should still be right. With any luck we've provided a weekend's worth of reporting results with few errors (it gets easier now that we have three races in the books and provisionals will be based on 2007 points) and some decent pictures as well.

Anyway it's time to get back on the road, we'll check back for the three readers interested in seeing me get home in one piece in the morning.

It's race day here at Iowa. We got here around 7:30AM local time to get everything set up and now it's approaching time for practice. It's sunny and warm so everything's shaping up to go well if only my allergies would cooperate. But we won't let that get in the way of the job at hand, which right now is to go out on pit road and start shooting pictures of cars and people and stuff.

Found the hotel, about 25 miles from the track and apparently it's not that far away as the Brett Thompson team from Idaho is here as well.

We can only echo the sentiments of others who have said what a great place Iowa Speedway is. The layout is great, the people are great... it's definitely Nextel Cup-worthy, too bad it's probably twenty years behind the time when it would have been a good time to build a track to host the Cup series because the environment for a track not of SMI or ISC origin and construction to get one of those coveted dates is not friendly. Hopefully there can be enough other stuff to keep the place going so it doesn't turn into another Pikes Peak International Speedway.

Bad news for Cliff (not me): the pit wall is pretty tall.

We don't have Kate here to take pics for EastSeries.com but Ken Spring let me empty his morning garage shots from his memory cards and we'll have those to post before heading to bed. I also have a bunch of pics from today to post, but those might have to wait till I get home.

There probably won't be many, or any, pics posted from Elko. I didn't shoot much around the pits and only got my single-car shots on the track during practice. I hadn't found my photography muse while in Minnesota but am making up for it a little further south.

We'll talk again in the morning.

We're stationed in the media center at Iowa Speedway so we must have successfully negotiated the roadie from track to track.

You know this is supposed to be a big deal when there's a guy out near the highway exit scalping tickets. Word is they're expecting 20,000 tomorrow, that sounds like a good round number.

Gassed up this morning at the same place I did when I was headed to Elko two days ago, gas went up a dime a gallon. Car's still only returning 27 MPG, my only guess for those bad numbers would be that the cruise finds itself set at 80 MPH a whole lot (speed limit was 70 from Ohio onward for the most part)... might have to try a tankful on the ride home doing the speed limit to see if we get north of the 30 MPG plateau.

So far everyone here has been great to work with, they're even using my points spreadsheet until the NASCAR guys get here to make things more official. And you should see the stylin' photo vest I got to wear.

Speaking of points, Cliff (not me) asked about points for non-qualifiers. At some point, perhaps the beginning of the 2006 season, the system was changed and fastest non-qualifier, regardless of whether the starting field was 26 or 43 cars, got 44th place points and so on down the line. This probably explains my points being different from NASCAR late in the season after we had cars not make the show at Dover. So while doing points last night I fixed the points for the DNQs from Greenville and now the complete standings should (keyword: should) be right. When we get inspired down the road, I'll have to look at last year's and make that closer to correct for the few drivers it affects.

Elko isn't a bad little track, all told. The people there were great to work with, we had good company in the press area with Penny D as always, and Lee Elder doing live reports for Racingwest.

We got through this day without exhausting camera batteries or scanner batteries, so we'll be in that much better shape for Saturday at Iowa.

Best story coming from Elko was that Peyton Sellers was the only driver near the front - that I'm aware of at least - who only brought one car for both races. And amazingly (probably the wrong word there), he has next to nothing to fix even though the racing in the top ten got very physical at times.

The plan for your intrepid reporter, as of 12:44AM local time, is to get as close to Iowa Speedway as possible in a safe manner, hoping to arrive in time for the garage to open to haulers at noon. We did ourselves a huge favor by formatting the results and posting points already so that'll open up the day to checking out the track and checking in with the teams in attendance.

So we'll talk next later this morning or early in the afternoon just to assure you that we got to track #2 in decent shape and we're a little closer to closing out this weekend and getting home to the missus and the pugs.

Seemed to take like forever but we're here chilling in the Jamerson Motorsports hauler, out of the wind, sipping an Olde Philadelphia orange cream soda.

There's a wireless network upstairs in the pressbox where the laptop's set up but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But we have ways around that for when it's time to post practice and qualifying results.

With that said we'll switch over to race coverage mode on the main site and check back here maybe after leaving the track tonight or from Iowa Speedway tomorrow afternoon.

Got to the Microtel in decent time and even had a little bite to eat. Right now, though, all we're interested in is laying down and sleeping. We're a hair more than a half-hour from Elko so it'll be a no-rush no-fuss morning taking advantage of a free hotel breakfast and getting to the track well before things get loud.

This livejournal thing worked out pretty well for the trip out here and I appreciated the comments from those who virtually came along for the ride. Hopefully the two races we're going to see in the next three days will be worth the effort.

Till tomorrow

Apologies for the lack of updates, there is a large stretch of road through Iowa where I was on Verizon's "extended network", which means no email or other internet stuff.

Right now I'm on I-35 just north of Des Moines with about 120 miles to the Minnesota border and, more importantly, 160ish miles from the Microtel I just reserved for the night.

If you don't have to gas up in Indianapolis, don't. It was about $3.30+ there but across the Illinois line I filled up for $3.13. Last tankful was at 3.19 in Newton.

Swung by Iowa Speedway as it's right off the highway and all I can say as far as first impressions right now is WOW. Looking over the track from an observation area over the backstretch, my jaw dropped. Amazing-looking stands, suites (and pressbox I hope?), garages, etc... Can't wait to get there Saturday morning and start prowling around.

Time to get back on the road, a hot shower and comfie bed sound pretty good right about now.

When we last left you, we left you with the impression that we were just outside Indy and snoozing. But after a few minutes I figured I wasn't really that tired so I hit the road again and wound up in Yard Man (?) Illinois, where I slept till noon.

Finally I've seen a couple race car haulers that are probably going where I am, two in fact. Both were blah white Renegades with absolutely no decals or lettering of any sort to help identify what's inside or where they've come from.

Saw a Cup-like hauler last night but that didn't count as it was headed in the other direction.

And I've been kinda kicking myself for not getting satellite radio, especially after Dave Dion gave me a fantastic sales pitch for Sirius at the Speedway Expo a few months back. You'd think he was on the payroll.

It's cloudy and breezy but dry and not dark so I guess we'll continue driving.

Now on I-74 past Indianapolis towards Peoria, Illinois. Probably not the ideal route but it keeps me out of big cities and off of toll roads, and what's another hour on a 20-hour ride?

This is probably a good time for a snooze. I got good sleep last night and I'm still feeling pretty fresh, but with all day tomorrow available to me, why push it?

And I apologize if it sounded like my attitude was suffering in previous posts. It just seemed at times that I wasn't getting anywhere, especially taking three hours to leave my home state, and Ohio is 225 miles wide as well. I'm sure I'll be better in the daylight and after shotgunning a couple of Dews.

Anyway I think I'm past halfway, I might as well take a break.

Somewhere between Columbus and Dayton, Ohio. Night has fallen so there's not too much to report on, aside from that last tankful averaging 30.9 MPG - not bad for the V6 sedan through the hilly parts of western Maryland. Now that the landscape has significantly flattened out that number should get closer to 32-33ish.

To answer some fan mail, this is far from a marathon. I've got a bit of wiggle/snooze room built into this trip that I shouldn't be pulling all-nighters to get to Elko before practice starts. Heck, back in the middle of nowhere on the other side of Columbus I saw a hotel/motel advertising $27/night rates - can't possibly go wrong with something that cheap, right?

Now would be a good time to get out the map and figure out how I'm going to get to where I'm supposed to go. A right turn at Indianapolis sounds right, except that Indy's still another two hours away.

Whose idea was this again?