Bristol Night race, 2010: Ponchos, (Driver) Pouting, and the Perfect National Anthem
Well, as many of you know, I have finally settled down (for the time being) in Knoxville, Tennessee, giving up my (not so) glamorous life as a travel nurse. I just decided 10 years was enough, and although I may travel again someday, I was soundly sick and tired of the moving involved.
Why Knoxville, you say? Well, aside from it being within a day’s drive of my family in Southern Ontario, and also my boyfriend in Iowa, I have several friends in the Deep South it will be nice to be close to.
Okay, the proximity to Bristol, Kentucky, Nashville, Charlotte, Martinsville, Richmond, Darlington, Atlanta, Talladega MAY have weighed in on my decision just a little bit.
So after my long summer vacation (during which I never DID get around to telling y’all my Infineon race day story! Sorry about that, but really, nothing very exciting happened. Good race, no sightings. Gateway was another story, but I just never got around to it, with all the vacation travel) and settling into my new home, I found I could afford a day in Bristol for the Cup race. 2 hours away??? You KNOW if it was at all possible, I was going to be there, come Hell or High Water (and believe me, the weather made the latter a distinct possibility!!).
The main problem I foresaw? NIGHT RACE. Probably over around Midnight. That 2 + hour drive back in race traffic (which means likely more like 4 hours) meant I’d be fighting sleepiness in race traffic alone. I’ve done this in the past…it’s just not fun. You end up doing a lot of talking to yourself to stay awake, and road rage may surface.
Jackpot!! I love Google!! I started my search of companies transporting fans up to the track from Knoxville. I mean, I have heard of many who stay in Knoxville and drive up, it’s one of the closest major cities near Bristol, and I had seen travel packages that offer this, so surely there would be a bus for locals going up.
It took me a couple of days playing with the wording of my search, (between shifts in the Baby Factory). This technique, changing the wording to fine-tune my search, is my specialty for finding deals on-line, and it didn’t fail me this time, either: Rocky Top Tours, leaving out of Pigeon Forge (near Dollywood) and stopping to pick more up in Sevierville (Dolly’s home town) before heading to the track, $30 round-trip. If I drove, gas alone would cost more than that!!
So I met up with a couple of dozen other sodden race fans (Knoxville’s weather was NOT promising!!) at the Sevierville Welcome Center, on a wet, wet, wet Saturday morning. No matter….I had packed in my trusty bottomless shoulder bag, with my scanner, camera, cushion and other necessary stuff (even sunscreen…the eternal optimist, that’s me!), my lucky rain slicker, a freebie about 5 years ago from RIR. Why is it lucky? Whenever I carry it with me to a race, it doesn’t rain!! That meant we’d leave the rain behind in Knoxville….
Sure. We DID drive out of the rain and arrive in an overcast, but dry, Bristol, TN, around 2pm. So far so good.
Stepping off the bus, it immediately started to spit. Uh oh!
Not to be deterred, as it got heavier and heavier (to the tune of the hawkers selling programs in plastic sleeves “Guaranteed to stay dry!” and t-shirts “Get your dry t-shirt!” LOL), I plunked my trusty Canada bucket hat on my head to keep my hair as dry as possible, and opened my bottomless bag to dig out the poncho, as it was going to be needed.
Only problem?? No poncho. Brain fart! When I first packed the bag for the track, I had thought about carrying my little cooler with some cold drinks, thinking it would likely be hot, and changed my mind about the cooler when I saw the forecast…and packed the slicker in the side pocket of that cooler. BLAME THE RAIN ON ME!!!
Best laid plans.
By the time I retraced my steps to the bus and got my umbrella (which I knew I’d have to forfeit at the gate…no umbrellas allowed into the stands…but it was old and starting to fall apart, so no biggie, and the rain WAS getting heavier and heavier) I was pretty wet, but as I returned to the track, I soon realized even THAT wasn’t going to be enough.
A flash of Sprint yellow in the corner of my eye showed a trailer selling yellow and clear slickers hand over fist, so I trotted over and got myself one. $5, not bad, and now, although steaming up with the greenhouse effect of the poncho over wet clothes, at least I wasn’t getting any more wet. I had my trusty waterproofed Dr. Marten’s on my feet, so they were nice and dry, having seen me through wetter and colder weather before.
But I now have a new wish….galoshes. I saw so many cute pairs of galoshes (we called them “rubbers” growing up, but that has a whole new definition as an adult, at least in America! LOL) at the track, I decided then and there I wanted some! Too late for this day, though.
Heading into the track, I knew right where I wanted to be….by the entrance to the track, where the pedestrian tunnel was, to watch the comings and goings of drivers etc. as they did their sponsor pre-race dances. Sure, this was clear around the other side from where my seat was, but I’d head over there later….
Dodging puddles, and indeed, giving up my trusty old umbrella at the gate, I gained the RELATIVE dryness of the area under the grandstand…well, if you didn’t count the waterfalls coming THROUGH the stands in spots! LOL
Making my way down to the track entrance, I started shedding the poncho as the dry spots got bigger, and my wind breaker, because although the rain was keeping it relatively cool, by Bristol standards, NOW I was starting to sweat!
Claiming a spot, I enjoyed the comings and goings. When the rain finally stopped, I headed up into the stands to get some pics, but always came back to my spot….I talked to a lovely young man who was one of many in red t-shirts hanging out in that area. No, they weren’t Kasey Kahne fans, they were National Guard, there to help with security…with all the rain there were few in the stands to patrol so they were in a holding pattern, but later, they were the ones who would be responsible for making sure fans didn’t scale the fences….in light of the guy we saw hanging like a monkey on the fence at Gateway in July when Carl won the race, I’d say they could have their hands full, and wished him good luck with that.
As the day wore on and drivers’ meeting time approached, the number of drivers, owners, etc, coming into the track increased, and I had a great time snapping photos.
When Jack Roush came through, all the fans there called out variations on “Welcome back, Jack!” to him as he walked by. He even paused long enough to make one young fan's day, with an autograph and a photo..
When Randy Fuller (Carl Edwards’ PR rep) walked out of the track alone, I called hello to him and wished him a good race. He said something back that I didn’t hear because of the ambient noise of all those people around, pointed over to the side of the walk-through area opposite from where I was, where some in Carl Edwards gear had gathered, and gave me a thumbs up, then headed on….it didn’t take me long to figure out he was letting me know Carl would be stopping with those fans, and to hang around if I wanted some pics. But then, you know I wasn’t leaving the one area all drivers have to go through to get into the track without seeing Carl, so I had no plans to move from that spot until he headed into the track.
Other than the tall guy who insisted on being in the way of some of the photos I took, I wasn’t disappointed…Carl hung out with those fans, doing a Q&A, for a quite a while before heading in to the drivers’ meeting. As he went by I and the other fans called out our well-wishes.
Matt Kenseth and Jeff Burton were busy little bees, going back and forth to sponsor engagements throughout the time I was there, and even Junior Johnson went through to the pedestrian tunnel.
The previous nights’ Nationwide combatants came through not very far apart, which I found amusing…you’d think Brad and Kyle would stay as far apart as possible after all that.
After seeing Carl, I headed out for the trek around the track to my seat, going down by the start/finish line and right along the frontstretch for some photos, then made the climb up into the stands….as I was sitting in Pearson Terrace, WAYYY up, I took the first elevator I came to to get up there….Had I climbed, my out-of-shape butt likely wouldn’t have made it!! LOL
Finding a perch closer to the Start/finish line than my seat, with a better angle for shots of the trucks carrying drivers around the track, I waited.
I still say the highlight of the whole night was Brad Keslowski calling Kyle Busch an Ass while introducing himself during driver intros. THAT had the fans making so much noise, had there been a roof over that track, it would have been lifted off! I myself, no fan of EITHER driver, but aware of the fact that Kyle had dumped Brad the night before to win the Nationwide race, almost fell out of my chair laughing….And by some miracle, although I don’t know why I turned on the video when Brad was introduced, it was on…and I caught Brad’s opinion for my permanent collection.
Too too funny!!
A few intros later, I believe it was AJ Almandinger who said in his intro something to the effect of he just hoped he didn’t end up between Brad and Kyle. LOL
As many of you know, the drivers pick a song to play before they are introduced. Many I didn’t even recognize, because IMO, the track PA system didn’t play the song clips loud enough, so unless it was something immediately recognizable to me, like Mark Martin’s choice of Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way” and Carl’s “Why Can’t We be Friends?” (IMO, a little poke at his own troubled past with Brad! Also funny, considering how many friendships have been tested over the years by that little bullring, Bristol Motor Speedway), I missed it. Some just made me LOL (Todd Bodine’s choice was particularly amusing: the theme from “The Three Stooges”…considering his past in Cup series, when I use to refer to Todd wrecking someone as that someone getting “Bodined” that was particularly apt), and others made me scratch my head (Really, Jamie Mac? A country song??? Maybe because I don’t follow him enough to know what he prefers, I just never pegged him for a country music guy…but then again, who knew Mark Martin loves rap? LOL).
As race time approached, it was WONDERFUL to hear the kids singing the National Anthem, LIKE IT SHOULD BE, with no ad-libs or horrible tweaks as we have heard so often recently. Sadly, although if the rain came again I was going to stay good and dry, my seat was up under the suits in turn 1, and I could only hear the flyover. Also up there, if you’re not lucky, one of the support pillars will block part of your view of the track. So despite what I’ve always been told, there IS a bad seat at Bristol, depending on what you want to see.
The only highlight of the race for me was Jimmie Johnson getting wrecked.
(ABJJ!! Or KB. Or BK. LOL). This wreck happened just after Carl’s pit crew missed a couple of lugnuts on one tire during the round of pit stops a few laps prior, causing him to have to come back in and go from running right were JJ was to back in the pack. On the plus side, as Bob relayed to Carl, the missing lugnuts and lost spots might have been a blessing in disguise, as if they hadn’t ended up back in the pack, it COULD have been them being wrecked by Montoya.
Hey, glass half full, why not?? At that point, they still had half the race to go, and a fast car, plenty of time to get back up to the front, right???
Unfortunately, the race settled into what you rarely see in a Nationwide or Truck race at Bristol, but which does occasionally happen during a Cup race since the track was resurfaced: a long green-flag run.
Now Carl qualified on the outside pole, his team selected the lead pit stall on the backstretch, one of the 2 best pit stalls at this track as in that stall: like the one on the frontstretch, there is no-one pitted in front of you…you just drive straight out, don’t have to worry about getting around another car in a pit stall in front of you.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think Carl wasn’t sure at what point during a green flag pit stop, when they enter the end of the pit lane their pit stall is on, and exit at the exit, instead of going all the way around both pit lanes like when they pit under caution, he could floor it after leaving his pit stall, while still on the flat. Bob told him they’d talk about it after the race on the radio, but I think Carl was supposed to just immediately start coming up to speed as soon as he left his pit stall, before merging into traffic in turn 4, and Carl said he waited until closer to turn 4 to really floor it….that caused him to end up back in the pack, and he almost immediately lost a lap.
Fortunately a caution FINALLY occurred, just in time for him to get the Lucky Dog pass. Sadly, though, another long green flag run spread out the pack, and Carl just didn’t have enough time to get up to the front.
The good news? Carl is now up to 4th in points…Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart both having a bad night allowed his 13th place finish to be enough to move up, so in the end, it was a good result from a fair night for the 99 team.
As the laps wound down, not wanting to fight through crowds down all those stairs, I worked my way to the ground level. Watching the last few laps from near the S/F line, I knew once again I was going to witness Kyle Busch winning. And THIS time, he’d finally get the Trifecta, winning all 3 races at a track in one weekend.
Nope, I was NOT going to watch that, it wasn’t worth fighting so much foot traffic out of the track, so I headed out to the bus, listening to the last couple of laps on the radio. Might as well get a head start on napping before they let the busses out of the lot an hour after the race finishes.
But all in all, getting rained on, Kyle Busch winning again, Carl having some bad luck and not ending up being in contention even though he had a car good enough to do so, I still say (as many many others do) Bristol Motor Speedway is one of the best tracks to be a fan at on the circuit!!! A bad day at Bristol beats a good day at a lot of other tracks any day!
Next time I’m sitting in the DW grandstand; I’m determined to find that set of seats perfect enough for me to consider buying season passes. I mean, come on, if I’m going to live this close for a few years, you KNOW I’ll be there!
