Claffie's Stuff

We rolled into the driveway a hair after 10:30 PM after Kate drove probably 85% of the ride home. This works out pretty nicely: she does the hard work while I sleep or get some work done. Sleeping is good since I have to be back at the day (night) job tomorrow night and should be staying up tonight at home to make sure I'm back on my bass-ackwards (I don't think that's really a word) schedule.

We've got a few reports to write and get out to team owners and/or the media list, then it's time to sit down and look at the ohhhh 2,000 pictures the two of us shot (Kate alone fired off 1,500 on Sunday), pick out the best ones and get them separated/sorted/cropped/resized/tweaked and then posted for general consumption. We've also fluked our way into being official photogs for a couple of teams on the tour in exchange for ga$ money and we'll have to take care of the paying customers as well. Ideally that'll all get done before 6 AM but seeing as how we're less than four hours from that now and haven't quite gotten started on that, having the pics up for viewing before you get out of bed Tuesday morning doesn't look like a realistic goal. On the other hand, there's nothing else to do at 2:20 AM so we might as well get to work.

And while it does seem like a lot of time to wait for photos after the event, imagine how long the lawn's going to have to wait before it gets an overdue mowing. That might not happen until Thursday!

We're counting ourselves fortunate that we've got a weekend at home coming up, and then a relatively short ride to and from South Boston for the next race.

Alternative title: Oh Deer

This might sound like a copy-n-paste from last year but the story is quite the same: leaving the track in waning daylight and driving until we've had enough of seeing whacked deer on the side of the road and pulling in before the odds caught up to us.

An hour into the ride we made a dinner stop at Stean N Shake with photog Chuck Buchanan, and that made for good company as well as perhaps getting some of his photos from the weekend to supplement both Kate's comprehensive coverage and my own boring single-car shots from practice.

We were back in action relatively early this morning and making good time. And while I started this entry when we were back in western Ohio, I'm finishing it in central Maryland. The GPS says we'll get home before 11 and that'll do just fine.

If you put your ears to your computer's speakers real close, you can hear driver introductions going on in the background.

We're less than 45 minutes before green flag here at Iowa and I'm in the track's pressbox, enjoying the cool breeze and strangers' cigarette smoke. How could this be in the pressox? Because there ain't one, and I'm left to fend for myself to find a place to watch the race that isn't a TV set inside a building in the infield.

I don't like to gripe about what perks are made available, or oughta be made available, to the Mini Media. We get to do a lot of cool stuff around a lot of cool people at some pretty cool places, so there's no real reason to gripe.

And there's no reason to expect every track we go to to have, say, pressboxes. But allegedly podunk tracks like South Boston have facilities for the working media where they can see the whole track. Even Beech Ridge has a pressbox, and we're supposedly too good to go there anymore (I do not subscribe to this theory). Even Thunder Road sets a table and chairs out next to its control tower for us freeloaders.

Iowa has not been as accomodating despite everything else being nearly on par with, say, New Hampshire Motor Speedway. When it comes to this one department, though, Iowa Speedway falls behind almost every other track on the schedule. Right now, I'd have a lot easier time getting my questionable job of reporting done at Music City Motorplex.

Last year we were left to our own devices and Penny scored a pair of suite passes. We're not as fortunate this time around. It's not like we're asking for the world, I'd be happy with a seat in the grandstands.

We're not sure how a track that aspires to the big time can overlook what I thought was an automatic necessary part of race track architecture. Maybe we're just expecting too much.

Ah well, it's just about time to go racing.

What a great day to be at the racetrack. Brilliant sunshine, 30 MPH winds gusting to 44 MPH, and fifty-plus cars to keep some sort of track of. Nothing happened until 4:00ish which meant plenty of time for vocalizing and socializing, and then things got loud.

We shot many many photos today and I know this will elicit groans from the readers of this space which could possibly number in the dozens, but odds are those photos won't be seen until some time after the weekend, probably Tuesday in fact. Tomorrow is going to be a pretty busy day with practice, qualifying, and the race happening in pretty quick order, and then there's that little issue of the ride home. We can get some stuff done at the track, and maybe even some stuff done while on the road, but photos aren't something that can be done well while in a moving car. If it's any consolation, we've looked through what we shot over the course of the day and there will be plenty of quality garage shots, candid shots, and on-track shots to show those who couldn't make it, and those who could, what Iowa looked like from our perspective.

Tomorrow starts early with a 6 a.m. wake-up call so we won't babble on much more and think about heading to bed. We'll check in when we get to the track tomorrow on the main site.

We made it in just fine after what was a really uneventful drive. The highlight was lunch at Steak 'n' Shake which turned out to be just absolutely EP (wait for it) IC. Probably at least 400 times better than any Waffle House.

We visited the track as expected and saw a couple of the ASA late models practicing while the NASCAR haulers were trickling in. Kobyluck's was already on site, as were a couple of West teams' and while we were there I think we saw the Chew Crew entering the property with their unremarkably unmarked white hauler.


We don't have to be at the track at the crack of dawn tomorrow, which comes as a nice surprise, and one that we won't have the luxury of enjoying on Sunday. The big things to accomplish tomorrow are to verify the iffy entry list that NASCAR has provided and make sure everyone gets through inspection with flying colors. We'll probably shoot a few pictures and update things on the main site as news items trickle in. Practice goes from 4:30 to 6 and we'll stick around for that before heading to Sonic and doing grevious harm to our diets for the second straight day.

Sunday's going to be the loooooooooooooooooong day.

We're somewhere on I-80 in Iowa and we just saw our first race car hauler. It's coming from N.C. but since it said 'Kyle Busch Motorsports' on the cab we're assuming it'll be entered as a West car.

Having two drivers is a nice plus. I drove to the other side of Indianapolis and packed it in somewhere around 4:30 AM. After a stop we switched seats, and when I woke up we were already probably 75% of the way through Illinois. We'll get to the track so fresh and alert it'll almost seem a shame that we're not continuing on up the road to Minnesota.

Almost.

The last gas-up was a crippling $62 thanks to $3.89/gallon Shell and her propensity to drive till the car starts sputtering and then daring to go one more exit before stopping. She put in 16 gallons and I'd be surprised if the tank held more than 17.

We should be in good shape to swing by the track to pick up our passes, then head for the hotel for some R&R so we're ready for when things get busy tomorrow.

Just like I thought would happen, once Kate started driving, I hit the sack. This significantly diminished my ability to make updates on our little boondoggle.

Anyway, it's safe to say that we're on our way, and quite a ways on said way in fact. As of now we're cruising through a rainy eastern Ohio (it never fails: if she's drriving, it's probably raining). What was a freshly washed and waxed Sonata yesterday probably won't be as purty when we get to where we're going.

Rest stop is at hand so we'll partake, then pick this up again a little further down the road.

Sometimes you're all set for a fight, know you're going to have a fight, maybe even, in some small perverted way, wanting a fight, and then out of the blue the expected fight doesn't materialize.

We (and by "we", I mean "I") arrived at the Manchester Airport an hour before the return flight's scheduled departure time and discovered that it was going to be delayed by a mere three hours (10:45 pm vs. 7:40 pm). Strangely enough, though, there was another Manchestah-to-Baltimore flight on Southwest scheduled for 9:45 pm and was listed as being on time.

My logic - which is not necessarily 100% logical to other people - figured that those showing up expecting to get on the earlier flight get first crack at the first plane going to the right airport, and those expecting to be on the later flight may wind up getting bumped back to what should have been the earlier flight that has now become the latest one.

If nothing else, we who were going to get delayed oughta have the opportunity to get onto the earlier plane. Kate said it probably wouldn't cost more than fifty bucks to do that, and I was quite prepared to kick and scream over the fact that there's no way no how I'm gonna pay one dime more over what's already been paid. After all, it's not like I had anything to do with the original flight getting delayed.

So I go to the counter bound and determined that this is gonna be a knock-down, drag-out fight till either me or the entire staff of Southwest is dragged out of the airport and onto the sidewalk (the reader can guess who will end up where). Between clenched teeth I say "I don't want to be here till 10:45 tonight" and hand over my 7:40 boarding pass. The chick spends about thirty seconds on her computer toiling in silence and the next thing I know I have a new boarding pass for the 9:45 flight, no extra costs, no shouting match, no heavy sighs, etc etc.

Oh. That was easy. Kudos to Southwest.

After all was said and done I got home just on the other side of midnight, roughly 20 hours after leaving. Air travel can come in awful handy sometimes.

Which must be why we're driving to Iowa later this week. Refer to the above quip about my possibly flawed sense of logic to try and explain this away.

We'll be back to this space all week, so stay tuned.

I believe it was that great philosopher Night Ranger who said something along the lines of "four in the morning, came without a warning, everybody's got a place to be". In the sleepy little town of Waldorf four in the morning came with plenty of warning in the form of some noise from the phone and plenty of rain falling outside. Under those conditions, there's no better way to get motivated by thinking of being at a racetrack in a matter of a few hours.

The plan is to jet up to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for the first of two open test days and then jet home, on the cheap of course. Once home, we'll have a couple days of work ahead of us before we leave on the longest road trip of the year.

I was prepared to continue going on and on at length over these subjects, but they just said we have to line up to prepare for boarding the plane, so we're shutting down now.

If it does, then we're ready to go on with our quite adventurous week. If it doesn't, well, then maybe we won't go anywhere, just out of spite. Go Kurt!

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.